According to AT&T, the company recently suffered a massive data breach that exposed call and text message data for almost all of their customers. This massive breach wasn’t even a blip on the media’s radar, but hundreds of millions of people have been violated and they don’t even know it. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: According to AT&T, the company recently suffered a massive data breach that exposed calls and text messages. It exposed all that data about all of their customers. This massive breach wasn’t even a blip on the media’s radar, but hundreds of millions of people have been violated and they don’t even know what happened. Well, the reason the media didn’t report is because the mainstream media or corporate media, it’s not mainstream anymore. I wish they’d do away with that term, mainstream media. It’s not. It’s far from it. But they wouldn’t tell this story because the advertising.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: The advertising is monstrous that AT&T is paying MSNBC and CNN and Fox and CBS, ABC, they’re paying so much money that they weren’t about to do a story. This is a serious story.
Farron Cousins: It it really is because this is not, like you said, okay, it’s not just, uh-oh, some data got out. Every customer, if you have AT&T, I have AT&T, my data was part of this. Everybody who has AT&T your data was part of this. They got your call logs, they got your text message logs. Now the company swears, they didn’t get the content of your text messages.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, they got enough.
Farron Cousins: But they got your location data. I mean, this is gonna be used by, probably improperly, I imagine by police. Right? Uh-oh, look, we got you talking to this guy. We got you in this location where a crime was committed. This is horrible and has horrible ramifications. But the personal data itself, and nobody knows that this happened, this was a big news. And honestly, this is a one page story. I mean, my God, this is such a huge data breach, one of the biggest in the history of data.
Mike Papantonio: But it’s just like everything about dysfunctional corporate media right now. Can you imagine choosing, having the guys in the top office say, no, don’t do this story because these people pay so much money for advertising.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: We’ve seen it firsthand. You’ve seen it. I’ve seen it firsthand. They’ll make the call, you better kill this story, or else. Matter of fact, my daughter, Sara’s working on a case, a baby formula case that is killing preemie children. Okay. There was a $60 million verdict in the case. And so Fox said, yeah, this is a big story. People ought to know that you got a product out there that’s killing people. But it was Abbott. It was these companies that make this stuff that advertise so much on their station. They killed the story. They killed it like, a week before they were supposed to do it. So this is just another example. And then I guess the thing that really is concerning, they say, well, they don’t actually have your social security numbers or your date of birth. Can you imagine how easy it is to find that with just these little traces of information that they take from your calls and your texts? I mean, it’s just a ridiculous argument. And the other part of it is we’re, as taxpayers, we’re having to pay the feds to go out and do all this investigation and find out what happened. And AT&T, they, what the hell? They don’t care. The feds are spending the money, taxpayers are spending the money, to stop all this. They’re not spending a dime from the standpoint of really making this a safe system.
Farron Cousins: Well, and thanks to the Patriot Act, they don’t ever punish any of these tech companies for the massive data breaches because they rely on them when they need to kinda skirt what’s legal and what’s not, because we’ve been covering that for 20 years now.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. Talk about that. People don’t get that, this symbiotic relationship between the feds and these companies.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And again, we have covered this for 20 years now, the fact that these telecom companies, they get in trouble a lot. They screw up a lot. They never get held accountable because every time it says, oh, okay, well, AT&T or Verizon, whoever you are, you did something really bad here. You let everybody’s data go out to the public. Okay. But we’re also working with you and providing you with all of this information, we’ve got these government contracts to work with you so that you can have this surveillance data on all the bad guys. Do you want to lose access to the so-called bad guys? No. So just forget the data breach. Forget all the bad stuff. We’re your buddies.
Mike Papantonio: We’re the best. We’re your friends. Yeah.
