So yesterday a federal judge (Richard Leon, DC district court, if you want to look him up) ruled that the NSA's bulk phone metadata program is "almost Orwellian" and probably unconstitutional. Its all over every tech site this morning and Im not going to rehash the whole ruling here because youve read it five times already by the time you got to my little corner of the internet. What I actually did instead of writing another "here's what this means" post was call AT&T and ask for my own call records. Just to see.
I dont know why it took me until now to think of this. Ive had a cell phone with them since 2007 or so. If some analyst somewhere theoretically could pull a spreadsheet of every number Ive called, every text timestamp, how long I talked to my mom on a random Tuesday in March, then surely I can get that too, right? It's my data. My phone. My bill.
Reader, it is not easy.
I called the regular customer service number first, sat through eleven minutes of hold music (its the same three songs on loop, Ive decided, and one of them sounds like a Muzak cover of something that used to be a Coldplay song), and when I finally got a person she had genuinely no idea what I was asking for. Not in a rude way, just a "sir I dont think thats a thing we do" way. She transferred me to billing. Billing transferred me to a different department that I think was technically for business accounts, even though Im on a personal plan. That guy at least understood the request, and told me I could request "detailed call records" going back a certain number of billing cycles, but it comes as a paper statement mailed to my house, itemized, and if I wanted more than the standard two years back there was a research fee involved that he could not quote me a number for over the phone.
So basically: the federal government, per multiple leaked documents over the past six months, has apparently had frictionless bulk access to this stuff going back years. I, the actual person the data is about, have to fill out a request and possibly pay a research fee and wait for the mail. That gap is the whole story for me. Not the legal theory, not the Fourth Amendment analysis, which smarter people than me are covering in way more depth than I could. Just the practical absurdity of it. The government's version of my life is apparently more accessible to the government than my version of my life is to me.
A small complaint while Im at it: AT&T's automated system, before you even get to a human, asks you to "say or key in the reason for your call today" and if you say anything that isnt one of about six pre-approved phrases it just loops you back to the start. I said "records request" three times before giving up and mashing zero repeatedly like its 2003.
None of this changes my actual behavior, to be clear. Im not going out and buying a burner phone or installing some encrypted call app (I looked at a couple, RedPhone was the one people kept mentioning, maybe Ill actually try it over the holidays when I have more patience for setup friction). Im also aware the ruling from yesterday doesnt actually stop anything immediately, Leon stayed his own order pending appeal because he expects the government to fight it, which they will, all the way up if they have to. So functionally nothing changes today. The program keeps running exactly as it was running on Sunday.
What did change, a little, is that I now have a mental picture of what "my metadata" would even look like as a physical object: a paper statement, itemized, mailed, possibly with a fee attached, arriving in maybe 7 to 10 business days according to the guy in billing. Not a real-time feed. Not a dashboard. A letter. Theres something almost funny about that mismatch, if you're in the mood to find any of this funny, which some days I am and some days Im really not.
Anyway. If anyone else has actually gone through the process of requesting detailed records from their carrier, Im curious what you found and whether it matched what you expected. My statement should show up sometime next week and Ill probably write about whatever's actually on it, assuming its interesting and not just three hundred lines of my own mother's phone number.