Threat Level - Wired Blogs
Threat Level - Wired Blogs:
An FBI proposal to pay the nations' telecoms to store phone records for years and to provide instant access to agents raises concerns about American's Constitutional rights, according to the ACLU. The $5 million per year initiative, revealed in the FBI's budget request (.pdf) for 2008, would continue ongoing payments to telecoms to reimburse them for filling emergency phone record requests from counter-terror investigators and be used to convince three telecoms to build special databases to store records for longer periods of time. AT&T and Verizon are two of the companies paid by the FBI, but the identity of the third is unknown.
The Justice Department has been pushing telecoms and ISPs to keep data longer and has pushed legislation to mandate a two-year "data retention" period for phone and internet records. While