If AT&T Won’t Tell Us the Truth about Surveillance, We Shouldn’t Trust Them

[Editor’s note: This is the continuation of a developing story about AT&T’s clandestine surveillance service, Hemisphere, which they secretly sold and marketed to law-enforcement agencies. Read the breaking story at the Daily Beast here.]

AT&T tells people — its customers, the public and the media — that its clandestine work with national-security and law-enforcement agencies is about compliance with the law.

I published a story in the Daily Beast on Tuesday that demonstrates that AT&T’s claim of merely “complying” with the law is false; rather, AT&T’s for-profit surveillance platform, Hemisphere, went above and beyond in its capacity to harness customers’…