The Electronic Frontier Foundation has sued AT&T for its complicity in the secret monitoring of millions of American’s phone and internet records by request of the NSA. EFF’s website has the scoop on their pursual of these scumbags:

In December of 2005, the press revealed that the government had instituted a comprehensive and warrantless electronic surveillance program that ignored the careful safeguards set forth by Congress. This surveillance program, purportedly authorized by the President at least as early as 2001 and primarily undertaken by the NSA, intercepts and analyzes the communications of millions of ordinary Americans.

In the largest “fishing expedition” ever devised, the NSA uses powerful computers to “data-mine” the contents of these Internet and telephone communications for suspicious names, numbers, and words, and to analyze traffic data indicating who is calling and emailing whom in order to identify persons who may be “linked” to “suspicious activities,” suspected terrorists or other investigatory targets, whether directly or indirectly.

But the government did not act-and is not acting-alone. The government requires the collaboration of major telecommunications companies to implement its unprecedented and illegal domestic spying program.

AT&T Corp. (which was recently acquired by the new AT&T, Inc,. formerly known as SBC Communications) maintains domestic telecommunications facilities over which millions of Americans’ telephone and Internet communications pass every day. It also manages some of the largest databases in the world, containing records of most or all communications made through its myriad telecommunications services.

It is extremely annoying to live in a society today when the foam-tongued ravings of the average college Freshmen enamored with the concept of a Big-Brother-like political state can not be dismissed by a ridiculously hyper-extended eye roll. But surveillance of our daily lives is no longer just the pipe-dream of the conspiracy aficionado. It’s hard to tell what’s more disturbing: a government agency asking AT&T to secretly spy on its customers, or AT&T just going along with it without any consideration of the privacy guidelines laid down by Congress. Doesn’t any corporation have a sense of decency anymore?

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