A note: I’m so sorry and very embarrassed that I’ve been AWOL for so long. I’ve been trying to claw myself out of a really bad place, and I think I’m getting there. I’m aiming for next week to be a good and productive week. *fingers crossed*
Soooo, I dunno if you’ve heard, but:
Hackers stole records detailing the phone contacts of almost all AT&T Wireless customers in one of the most serious breaches of sensitive consumer data in recent years, the company disclosed in a securities filing Friday.
The cache includes the numbers called or texted by more than 100 million customers between May 1 and Oct. 31, 2022, as well as one day in January 2023. It contains the numbers themselves as well as the frequency and combined durations of the interactions, but not the customer names or the content of those communications, AT&T said.
Since most numbers can be tied to real names, such records illuminate who is close to whom. That would provide a road map for criminals who could impersonate a friend or relative to trick a victim. Texts from financial institutions could be mimicked to get an account holder to divulge passwords, and workplace relationships could reveal the identity of U.S. spies.
That’s from The Washington Post. CNN really tries to downplay it:
Importantly, AT&T said the stolen data did not include the contents of calls and text messages nor the time of those communications.
But you don’t need the actual content of phone calls to draw some stunning conclusions from metadata like this… as the simultaneously fascinating and infuriating 2016 documentary A Good American demonstrates. Here, NSA whistleblower Bill Binney discusses the computer program he developed, called ThinThread, which used analysis of mass dumps of phone metadata to peer into the future and predict geopolitical events. Turns out that just knowing who is talking to whom, for how long and how regularly, can tell you a shit-ton of what people are up to, including things like terrorists attacks, national invasions, and political revolutions. ThinThread would have absolutely prevented 9/11, multiple insiders insist here, if the NSA hadn’t trashed it for enraging reasons that I will leave you to discover.
So, if you’re an AT&T customer who has, say, been calling your therapist a lot, or texting someone multiple times a day who isn’t your spouse, you’d better hope that these hackers don’t quite understand that they have hella useful blackmail material on their hands…
(John Scott-Railton on Twitter has a good rundown on why the AT&T data breach is particularly alarming.)
(Read my 2017 review of A Good American.)
US: stream on Kanopy; rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
UK: stream on Prime; rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
See A Good American at Letterboxd for more viewing options, including in all other global regions.
