641A is mentioned in the article, but here's the wiki link for those who might miss it:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A</a><p>Essential history, especially considering the prospective mutant ingurgitation of Time Warner.
This is actually the better option when compared to a government agency spying on you. This exact design's been happening in banking for decades where banks are required to investigate and report on suspicious activities that take place within their walls (so to speak). The consequences of allowing fraud, money-laundering, etc. to go unreported is an extremely high federal fine. As a result, banks now have sophisticated monitoring and reporting systems to comply with those laws. It makes sense that communications companies would do the same and here's why:<p>When you choose to pay a company like AT&T for their service, there is a reasonable expectation of privacy, but that privacy comes with the realization that they always have access to your account and transmitted data. It's part of the contract you sign. If you are going to communicate through AT&T, they're going to interact with the communications you send, no matter what you do. However, they have a major incentive to keep those communications confidential: their brand. Companies need their brands to be solid, respected, and free of scandals. If they start violating our privacy, we're going to be upset and stop buying their products. They know this, otherwise they wouldn't be in business. It's like business 100-level stuff. So when a government request comes in, it's in their best interest to walk a line between compliance and privacy. They don't want to give up all consumer data due to the brand risk, but they also don't want to get fined. These competing motivations lead to the implementation of accurate surveillance systems, not dragnet style sweeps. The government, on the other hand, does not have a brand to protect or market competition to worry about. They can do whatever they want and get away with it because they can keep all their misdeeds secret, hidden even from the laws that are supposed to keep them in check.<p>So for my money, I prefer a private company do this as opposed to a government agency. A private company is much more likely to follow the rules given by a regulatory agency (it protects them if we find out about stuff like the linked article) than a government agency is to follow the rules given by politicians in Congress (no one watches the watchers).
This seems inefficient. Why not have a government entity representing enforcement/intelligence run the infrastructure directly? It would remove the deceit that presently exists. Everyone would explicitly know that the government was monitoring everything that went over the network. It would be clear that if we wanted to avoid such monitoring that we would have to do something special.<p>As a bonus it could be set up to solve the last mile monopoly problem. That way all the money we pay for the current secret surveillance could actually do us some good.