Verizon Business, a unit of No. 2 U.S. telephone service provider Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N), said on Wednesday it has won a contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security worth around $678.5 million over 10 years.
… AT&T Government Solutions, a business unit of AT&T Inc (T.N), won a $292 million contract to serve as the secondary network service provider in the Eastern and Western region.

And nothing for Quest.  Read more 

All your social networking belong to us:

DAVOS, Switzerland - AT&T Inc. is still evaluating whether to examine traffic on its Internet lines to stop illegal sharing of copyright material, its chief executive said Wednesday.

CEO Randall Stephenson told a conference at the World Economic Forum that the company is looking at monitoring peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, one of the largest drivers of online traffic but also a common way to illegally exchange copyright files.  Read more 

I am not making this up, nor is it from the Onion. This is from today’s* Thursday’s Houston Chronicle. Thoughtful of them to run this just days before Christmas don’t ya think, when everybody is attending so closely to the news?

Texans seeking to escape the next hurricane or state emergency by evacuation bus will first be submitted to criminal background checks, the state’s emergency management director says.

Does this sound, um, what to pick first, a tad complicated logistically speaking?  Read more 

[Welcome, InfoWorld readers. Note to Bob®: I am absolutely Pammy’s biggest fan!]

[UPDATE: Comedy gold! Pravda on the Potomac’s weak-chinned Fred Hiatt buries the story on D01.]

[UPDATE: SJC puts off granting the telcos immunity, because the Republicans demanded more time to consider the 26 amendments. At least they didn’t go with Spector’s bogus Compromise, where the Federal government—that is, you and me as taxpayers—would have assumed the liability the telcos are on the hook for. Modified rapture.]  Read more 

And fuck the cellcos and the telcos, because they use their powers as network gatekeepers to lock us into contracts with outrageous cancellation fees for what should be a commodity service. So, excellent news:

A 17-year-old hacker has broken the lock that ties Apple’s iPhone to AT&T’s wireless network, freeing the most hyped cell phone ever for use on the networks of other carriers, including overseas ones.

Of course, Bush will probably send him to Gitmo, but he’s young…  Read more 

[Welcome, Crooks and Liars readers. Remember that the hearing is happening today, so let’s be on the alert to see how—or, it’s be optimistic, if—our Constitution is further shredded by Bush’s monarchical pretensions.]

Prove me wrong. Please.

WaPo’s Dan Eggen writes of the lawsuit:

In 2003, Room 641A of a large telecommunications building in downtown San Francisco was filled with powerful data-mining equipment for a “special job” by the National Security Agency, according to a former AT&T technician.

The secret 24-by-48-foot room described by [whistleblower Mark] Klein was on the sixth floor of a building at 611 Folsom St. in San Francisco. Klein said the NSA “special project” was well known to the small community of company technicians, and he has provided internal documents to the court describing the “cuts” that were required to split Internet traffic and route a signal to the servers and other equipment in the room.

“I conclude that AT&T has constructed an extensive — and expensive — collection of infrastructure that collectively has all the capability necessary to conduct large-scale covert gathering of [Internet protocol]-based communications information, not only for communications to overseas locations, but for purely domestic communications as well,” said [J. Scott] Marcus, a veteran computer network executive who worked at GTE, Genuity and other companies before joining the FCC.

That’s the context, about which our hair has been on fire for quite some time now. What we have left of our hair.

And now, a simple matter of timing:

Tomorrow [that is, today], a three-judge panel will hear arguments on whether the case, which may provide the clearest indication yet of how the spying program has worked, can go forward. So far, evidence in the case suggests a massive effort by the NSA to tap into the backbone of the Internet to retrieve millions of e-mails and other communications, which the government could sift and analyze for suspicious patterns or other signs of terrorist activity, according to court records, plaintiffs’ attorneys and technology experts.

Now, the Republicans would have dearly loved to retroactively legalize all this lawbreaking.

But they couldn’t manage it.

However, Harry and Nancy, when they gutted FISA at midnight before scuttling back to the district, managed to do what the Republicans couldn’t:  Read more 

[The story of Bush’s odd bike ride near NSA headquarters is at the end. As Josh points out, “the intensity of the covering up doesn’t match the alleged secret.” However, if Bush was personally involved in handling any of the warrantless surveillance data, that would definitely account for the intensity. Foily? Who but the foiliest, back even after 9/11, could have imagined this story would even be happening?]

The Times, today:

A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases, according to current and former officials briefed on the program.

It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate. But such databases contain records of the phone calls and e-mail messages of millions of Americans, and their examination by the government would raise privacy issues.

Well, well. As we wrote over a year ago, after combining careful examination of how Republicans parse their statements with network engineering knowledge available through open sources:

Long story short: (1) Internet surveillance is Bush’s goal, not voice calls; (2) the Republican “wiretap” talking point is a diversion, to voice, away from from Internet surveillance; (3) Bush’s domestic surveillance system would pose no engineering challenges whatever to NSA. No rocket science—or tinfoil hats—required.

Can we please stop talking about “wiretaps” now? It’s not your voice communications Bush wants. It’s your mail.

I don’t have time tonight, alas, to summarize all our work on warrantless surveillance (go read).

So I’ll summarize some key points as I see them. Don your foil:  Read more 

The accelerating rush to re-amalgamate the entire US phone system (the breakup of which was just about the last gasp of active antitrust enforcement) has hit a speed bump. One of the FCC commissioners whose vote is needed to allow the merger of BellSouth (my phone company, and the only source of broadband Internet in my exceedingly rural area) and the resurgent AT&T is refusing to vote on the matter. He made this decision final today. Robert McDowell says it would be unethical for him to vote on the matter as he has recently done lobbying for the telecommunications industry.  Read more