• qwertyqwertyqwerty@lemmy.one
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      8 months ago

      This predates cell phones. I believe there was a government wiretapping program for many non-criminal citizens back in the 80’s. The program was shelved publicly when it became public knowledge, but continued in the background under different names and different areas of government since. I don’t have a source offhand, but there was a lot of stuff that came to light about this around the time Edward Snowden blew the whistle. The Patriot Act just made a lot of this more legal, and was even expanded under Obama. I don’t believe Trump or Biden have done anything to improve the situation for citizens since.

      • Rapidcreek
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        8 months ago

        Wireline and wireless all have the ability to tap and trace built into the equipment. If a legal document is presented, it is a very easy thing to do.

        • AngrilyEatingMuffins@kbin.social
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          8 months ago

          They don’t bother with the legal document. Literally every phone call is tapped, and recorded. Many are transcribed. They’ve been waiting for AI to help parse it. Things are going to get a lot worse soon, unless we change course drastically.

          • Rapidcreek
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            8 months ago

            Way too much data to record from everyone. Target numbers supported with subpoena can be recorded by the legal agency sure. But, the operating companies don’t do it. Too expensive.

              • Rapidcreek
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                8 months ago

                The NSA is looking for patterns not recording everything. They do look for keywords, which might in turn justify recording.

                And I wouldn’t take Snowden’s word for anything.

  • Rapidcreek
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    8 months ago

    Phone records are the property of the operating company. It’s a business record. Every operating company has a compliance manager who works to provide legal access to the company’s business records. Of course, the effort to do that costs money for the company. But, for a company to allow access to its business records without a legal subpoena, means that the operating company is not run worth shit.

  • TangledHyphae@lemmy.worldOP
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    8 months ago

    Side note: I can’t get lemmy to recognize a regular “&” in the title without it being transformed into “&”.

    • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      Psst… I messaged you just now RE: the deleted 2023 picture of the year post. I had to use a browser as neither Memmy nor Voyager (iOS) supported the feature, although the latter pretended to.

      Messaging is definitely in its infancy. Required quite a backwards flow to find the sent message, after determining how to find you in the first place given you were on another instance.

      /threadcrap (sorry readers)

      (Actually I’ll keep crapping because I had to troubleshoot why I couldn’t reply to your “Roses are #FF0000” comment… looks like that post was deleted, but Lemmy via browser wasn’t going to warn me besides spinning a pinwheel after I clicked “[post] reply”.)