Commodify Your Wiretaps

Just in case it wasn’t clear that everything that can be commodified, will, domestic surveillance turns out to be just another product. And the customer thinks it’s, like, way overpriced. The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit on Monday against Sprint, alleging that the telecom overcharged the government for, yes, wiretapping and pen register services.

“The suit accuses Sprint of inflating the bills it submitted to federal law-enforcement agencies for wiretaps and other surveillance services to cover capital expenditures necessary to respond to the requests—something prohibited by federal law and Federal Communications Commission rules, according to the complaint filed in federal court in San Francisco,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

The government accuses Sprint of disguising improper equipment expenses as “regular surveillance costs.” Because of course major American corporations now have “regular surveillance costs,” routine monthly charges generated by government access to private customer conversations and their associated data. “Hello, Eric? We’re having a sale on pen registers this month. Two for one, act now! As a bonus, we can offer you information about a convenience-store manager in Sioux Falls who’s making the most outrageous phone calls to his mother-in-law.”

Just imagine the revenues the Stasi could’ve generated for corporate partners if they hadn’t been communists. Mercifully, though, we don’t have that problem. Market forces are at work, and that means opportunity. If telecoms are overcharging for signal intercepts, competitors could offer better pricing for digging through targets’ trash cans, skulking in alleys, and sleeping with informants to score secrets. The resulting pressures would force telecoms to bring wiretap-pricing back in line with what the market could bear. If there’s a market in the erosion of personal privacy, then Lord, let it be a free market.

The U.S. government accuses Sprint of overcharging it by $21 million over the course of three and a half years. “As alleged, Sprint overbilled law enforcement agencies for carrying out court-ordered intercepts, causing a significant loss to the government’s limited resources,” said the U.S. attorney in San Francisco. The FBI, for example, was allegedly overbilled by $10.6 million, cutting deeply into its annual budget of just $8.3 billion. That hardly even leaves enough to buy lunch. Have you ever been interrogated by a hungry FBI agent?

The DOJ’s filing—headed “JURY TRIAL DEMANDED”—can be read as a PDF file here. To recover $21 million in alleged overbilling, and the penalties on it, this $27-billion-a-year organization is demanding a jury trial that will have the unpleasant consequence of bringing evidence and testimony about its domestic surveillance efforts into open court.

That’s EPIC. Or at least, let’s hope.