• by September 28, 2007

First thought -- why on earth should a carrier have any sort of involvement in what content is transmitted? This makes me wonder if they are looking at everything. Carriers are pin head geeks who know wires, not words. I guess I'm a moron as well as I didn't know carriers inspected messages to this apparent extent.

Secondly -- Doesn't this process slow down what should be real-time or near-real-time communication?

Third -- Who is doing the decision making about what goes or not? I imagine they have some sort of automated filter setup to capture "interest" words. But who, then, is looking at the flagged messages and making the final call? Some 21-year-old fresh out of school with a nose ring and an attitude, who's in temping for the week while the editor is on vacation? What if the person that set this up is a Catholic who doesn't like Lutherans and all the evil that Lutherans represent? And therefore arbitrarily blocks all Lutheran keywords?

Final - Who, What and Where did they get the authority to do this? What happened to free speech and all those other Constitutional rights? Or is this some new Homeland Security thing?

On the other hand, what if Verizon captures text messages from the next Al Qaida superstar? And by capturing these text messages Verizon prevents another domestic event from occurring? Then is it OK to snoop through people's text messages?

Lots of shades of gray here imo. I can see both sides...