Monday, October 22, 2007

Making a profit from wiretapping

Some interesting news from across the pond here. It seems that Comcast, one of America's largest telecommunications company has a handbook which outlines its charge rate to the Federal Government when requests for writetapping comes in under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Apparently Comcast charges $1000 for the initial wiretap and then a monthly charge of $750 to maintain it. Not a bad little profit. This got me wondering, do BT and the other Telco's charge the Government in the UK for wiretaps? Time to FoI the Home Office and ask, although I don't hold out hope of a reply.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

i understand that the mobile phone companies charge for triangulating onto moblile phone locations - a lot of money - surely license should have included this public service for free

Anonymous said...

The government will probably hand out the job to "Tesco value" on a PFI.