So if I change phone service...

[peacebaby3]

If I change all of my services, long distance and local, from BellSouth (soon to be AT&T), don't they still own my lines? Will it make any difference as far as tapping? I have DSL also, but not through them, but it is still their lines.

[Touchdown]

1. Yes...mostly.

You can use companies that will bring their own signals to your house, but that's generally cable TV, or wireless service. Competitor companies usually just re-sell BellSouth's service, so you will be using the same lines as you do now.

[I_Will]

2. I don't think any changes you make will ultimately matter...

Given how the telephone networks (and the internet, for that matter) are structured, if you want to get a message from Place A to Place Z, all the details of the message (not the content, per se) such as where it originated from and where it's bound are recorded and are passed through a hierarchy of handoffs, any or all of whom may record the call info so as to accurately reconcile intercarrier billing and/or traffic loads.

<Summary is in the last paragraph, if you're not interested in the (simplified) detail>

It begins at your local phone company office. If your call is truly local (like within the same neighborhood), it can stay within the neighborhood's central office and the call detail may or may not be tracked. If you're calling to the next neighborhood over, the call may be trunked directly to that neighborhood's central office, or it may traverse a tandem to which both central offices are connected and which serves as an in/out hub for traffic. In either case, the originating and terminating information now the possibility of having been recored by at least two switches; yours and/or both the tandem and the far end switch.

Here's where it gets to not mattering.

If your call leaves your general area, it needs to get handed up to a carrier (who usually has pipes into the tandem or directly connects to specific central offices, depending on traffic) to provide the inter-city/cross country/international transport. Sometimes your major local phone company provides its own transport. Sometimes the local phone company hands it off to what used to be considered long distance companies. Remember that the newly consolidated RBOCs (AT&T=(SBC=(Ameritech+SNET+Southwestern Bell+PacBell)+BellSouth) and Verizon=(NYNEX+BellAtlantic+GTE+MCI) now own the old long distance carriers ***and*** they also own a lot of the cellular traffic that goes local and long distance.

Qwest is a bit of an oddball, but not really. If you're calling from Minneapolis to St Paul, Qwest would handle the call and could record it as having occurred on both switches. If you're calling from Minneapolis to Denver, Qwest could hand it off to their longhaul trunks and deliver it to the Denver tandem switch, so even though it's all-Qwest, the call information is recorded at your local office, the local tandem, the longhaul switch, the distant-end tandem and the distant end switch. If you're calling from Minneapolis to Atlanta, Qwest may not have direct longhaul facilities to an Atlanta tandem, so they may hand it off to...you guessed it: AT&T or Verizon! At a minimum, it would be recorded Qwest and by BellSouth (aka AT&T) at the distant end, because they get to charge AT&T (which is to say, themselves) for delivering the call.

In any case, these carriers (AT&T, Verizon/MCI, et al.) are presented with the originating and destination information so that they can bill back the locals, whittle down "bundle" minutes or otherwise reconcile and report traffic. *Every* machine that your call goes through will (probably) make a record. And given how networks are engineered for reliability, the specific path, switch owner and number of switches that any two identical calls would go through is virtually impossible to predict for sure in advance.

As to small independent phone companies (non-Bells, like CenturyTel, or one-town little ones) and CLECs or Voice-over-IP providers, they have even less (if any) of their own inter-city/cross-country/international facilities, so they hand they get their traffic up to the RBOC tandem (which is to say, usually AT&T/Verizon) and out to the long haul carriers (which is to say, AT&T/Verizon). Even if a local telco is going through a "no-name" long haul provider, *that* provider may ultimately have their transport deal with AT&T/Verizon. And guess what. In order to reconcile billing, everybody will probably keep (or have ad hoc access to) a record of the call detail as it pertains to their own network or contract obligations.

<Summary>

The consolidation in the local telephone industry over the past few years - and the allowance for them to fold the long distance and cellular businesses into themselves - has made it possible for just two entities (AT&T & Verizon) to have access to virtually every call record of consequence in this country...and beyond. Whether the call is local, regional, coast-to-coast or international, AT&T/Verizon are the physical entry/exit points for the *vast* majority of traffic. And given that these same companies (and their cellular arms) are in the largest cities, even the truly local neighborhood-type call detail can be collected and put in the data mining hopper by just these two companies. Information is power, and by virtue of almost unchecked RBOC consolidation (which looks a lot more nefarious, in hindsight) the bulk of that telephone information power rests with just two companies.

[peacebaby3]

4. Holy crap! I think I actually understand your reply. Basically there is

nothing any of us can do. Even services like VOIP/Vonage are subject to this as well if I understand correctly. True? I'm still rather ignorant when it comes to those services.

I was afraid we were all screwed.

Thanks very much for your great answer. I read the entire process because I like to know how things work. It was very educational for me!

[I_Will]

5. you understand correctly...

VoIP providers like Vonage, the facility-based CLECs (that remain), the cable operators *all* have to interact with the "public switched telephone network" (PSTN) somewhere along the line in order to get telephones to ring at the distant end. And virtually all the main hubs of the PSTN (domestic and international) are controlled by AT&T and Verizon. There's simply no other way around it. So the press reports that "only" two companies were implicated (AT&T/VZ...ok and BellSouth, but it's merging with AT&T). The fact is that virtually all of the population - directly or indirectly - puts call records on or through their networks, whether you're "their" customer or not.

Now, if you *happen* to live in a rural area and you get telephone service from a local telephone cooperative that isn't owned by a larger independent (like CenturyTel, TDS, Citizens, etc.) and you *never* place or receive calls to or from "the outside world" your call records are probably secure. Odds are that's not the case.

The only scenario where I can imagine there might be somewhat little less interaction with AT&T/VZ is that of a completely on-net VoIP call, like Skype-to-Skype/PC-to-PC, "sitting-there-with-the-headphones-on" calls where the "call" never touches the PSTN. Of course, even in a Skype environment, all you (they) would have to do is insert a router in front of (or simply demand the logs from) the Skype servers and the record of the IP-to-IP or MAC-to-MAC address connection could be found and filtered the same way that telephone numbers are allegedly being treated.

The bottom line is that when you want to connect two devices across the phone network or the internet, there *has* to be an originating address and a terminating address to get you from here to there. And, since none of us has private, point-to-point voice or data connections directly to a single destination, our requests to get from here to there *must* go through (several) intermediary switches/routers/companies, all of whom can (and should, for business reasons) keep records of every "request for service."

So, phone numbers, IP addresses or MAC-layer addresses represent the same "from-to" basic info that everyone tracks along the way; it's just a matter of a different numbering scheme as to what goes into the database to determine the relationships. For the past 100+ years this wasn't a problem: we - and the institutions we entrusted our calling information to - shared the notions of privacy and the expectations of due process: the rules have changed.

[peacebaby3]

3. Thanks to both of you for the reply. n/t