NSA spies in your company?; Twitter sues US government; Telstra pushes wholesale price increase

Telstra is angling to raise its wholesale charges for fixed line services by 7.2%, raising the ire of competitors and resellers.

The telco argued for the price increase in a submission to the ACCC. According to Computerworld, Telstra said that although it expects to cut some fixed line costs as NBN uptake increases and Australians leave the copper network, this decline in costs won’t match a decline in demand.

“As most of Telstra’s network costs are fixed, it is inevitable that if the number of people who use the network declined the cost per user would rise,” the telco argued.

But competitor Optus argued in its own submission to the ACCC that many of the drivers of the decline in demand for fixed line services over the copper network “are within Telstra’s control and it is largely protected from the impact of the decline for fixed line services”.

Optus also argued that the payments Telstra receives to migrate users from the copper network to the NBN should be taken into account when setting fixed line prices.

“It is important for the NBN payments to be taken into account when setting access prices otherwise there is a very real risk that Telstra will be overcompensated for the provision of fixed line services.”

M2 Group Chief Executive Geoff Horth said that if the ACCC granted Telstra’s request, “Invariably the price rises would just get passed onto consumers and I don’t see how that is in anyone’s interests,” Fairfax reported.

M2 is a reseller of Telstra’s broadband products.

Twitter sues the US government

Twitter has taken the US government to court to gain the ability to detail government surveillance requests.

The suit names as defendants US Attorney General Eric Holder, The US Department of Justice, FBI Director James Comey and the FBI.

Twitter lawyer Ben Lee took to the company blog to explain.

“As part of our latest transparency report released in July, we described how we were being prohibited from reporting on the actual scope of surveillance of Twitter users by the U.S. government. Our ability to speak has been restricted by laws that prohibit and even criminalize a service provider like us from disclosing the exact number of national security letters (“NSLs”) and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) court orders received - even if that number is zero,” Lee wrote.

Lee said Twitter has a First Amendment right to provide information about the scope of US government surveillance. “We should be free to do this in a meaningful way, rather than in broad, inexact ranges,” he said.

Lee said the company is asking the federal court permission to publish Twitter’s full Transparency Report, and to declare restrictions on its ability to speak about government surveillance as unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

NSA spies in tech companies

Documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden indicate that the NSA may have inserted undercover operatives inside technology companies, The Intercept reported over the weekend.

The Intercept is a publication co-created by Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists who first revealed information leaked by Snowden.

According to the website, leaked documents include references to the NSA infiltrating clandestine agents into “commercial entities”.

The documents do not specify if these agents might be working as full-time employees at these companies or whether they are visiting commercial facilities under false pretences.

The Intercept also did not specify that the commercial entities in question were necessarily technology companies.

But the website quoted Chris Soghoian, principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union, as saying: “It’s something that many people have been wondering about for a long time. I’ve had conversations with executives at tech companies about this precise thing. How do you know the NSA is not sending people into your data centres?”

Image courtesy r2hox under CC