Recently, the news media has been ablaze about how the mighty AT&T wants to charge more for the bandwidth it sells to people with smart phones, most notably the I phone. In all the hubbub one fact remains absent from the public view, AT&T is using a great chunk of it’s bandwidth to pipe data to the NSA and other 3 letter agencies.

On December 9th, AT&T chairman Ralph De La Vega stated “ The first thing we need to do is educate customers about what represents a megabyte of data” and “ We’re improving systems to give them real time information about there data usage. “ he said “ Longer term, there’s got to be some sort of pricing scheme that addresses the [heavy] users”

Isn’t it awful convenient he forgets that the federal government is the heaviest user out there?

Earlier this year, Mark Klein released a book entitled “ Wiring up the Big Brother machine…and fighting it” where he outlines his personal experiences with the technology vacuuming data from the central office in San Francisco as well as his tale of woe bringing this to light. Just google for his name if you want to know more about him. Or better yet, buy the book he self published.

Fast forward to this Friday, at 12:00 noon PST ( 3:00 EST) Fake Steve Jobs has called for “ Operation Chokehold”, an idea he conceived on his blog post here, http://www.fakesteve.net where the scheme is aimed at bringing AT&T’s wireless data network to a crawl Friday afternoon as a protest against plans by AT&T to impose fees on Iphone users who use what the company considers too much bandwidth.

Reaction to this has been varied, “We understand that fakesteve.net is primarily a satirical forum, but there is nothing amusing about advocating that customers attempt to deliberately degrade service on a network that provides critical communications services for more than 80 million customers,” an AT&T spokesman said when contacted by Cult of Mac. “We know that the vast majority of customers will see this action for what it is: an irresponsible and pointless scheme to draw attention to a blog”

“Threats of this nature are serious and we caution the public to use common sense and good judgment when accessing the Internet from their commercial mobile devices,” Jamie Barnett, chief of FCC’s public safety and homeland security bureau, said in a statement. “To purposely try to disrupt or negatively impact a network with ill-intent is irresponsible and presents a significant public safety concern.”

But wireless experts aren’t sure if this will actually lead to a denial of service situation on AT&T’s data network.
“Since it’s a distributed network, it’s going to depend on where the traffic is concentrated and how many cell towers are involved,” said Steve Beauregard, president of Santa Monica, Calif.-based mobility solution provider Regard Solutions.
On the flip side, the disruption will only involve the data side of the house. 911 calls will work regardless as they are routed differently. AT&T’s 3G network will continue to drop calls during the protest as it always does, the protest certainly cannot fix that.

There position on “Net Neutrality” is not all that great either, As James W. Cicconi, Senior Executive Vice President of External and Legislative Affairs stated to a letter to the FCC stated “As the “net neutrality” debate has evolved over the past several years, there are three points on which all parties seem to agree. First and foremost, consumers must remain at the center of every discussion we have on Internet policy. Second, preserving the open character of the Internet is critically important to ensuring that all consumers have the opportunity to be creators of content and innovators from their homes or their garages. Finally, and most fundamentally to AT&T, government policy must preserve and expand incentives that drive the substantial private investment necessary so that the promise of the Internet is fully realized and maximally available. Any Internet policy should balance these three objectives.”

Yes AT&T, you really broke the camel’s back this time. You spy on us. You want to manipulate traffic and tell us how much of the Web we can bite off. Your customer service sucks, your network does not work correctly, your service is unnecessarily expensive and the best thing that’s happened to your corporate outlook in years — the Iphone — is now part of the problem.

The solution, to me, seems simple enough UNPLUG THE NSA. Then your bandwidth issues will magically vanish