By Mary Jane Irwin, 8:43 PM on Tue Oct 16 2007, 221 views (Edit, to draft, Top, Slurp)

Copy this whole post to another site

Slurp cancel

select site advertising consumerist deadspin defamer fleshbot gay fleshbot gawker gizmodo idolator io9 jalopnik jezebel kotaku lifehacker valleywag artists gawkershop

AT&T has taken a lot of shots for its evenings spent moonlighting as spy, but it turns out it's not the only telecom happy to hand over customer call information at the first sign of a government request. Verizon has happily supplied such information hundreds of times since 2005. But to our minds, the scandal here isn't that Verizon is volunteering to play snoop — it's that it's cheating shareholders by not charging for the privilege. Verizon is already prepping to share calling data with third parties. It wouldn't be too difficult to create a vast, for-pay resource for private investigation firms. How much would you pay to figure out who that 310 number your husband calls four times a day belongs to? Thought so.