First AT&T wanted to spy on all our phone calls (or at least allow the NSA to). Now it looks like they want to spy on our Internet traffic (this time without any involvement from the NSA). According to the LA Times,

AT&T Inc. has joined Hollywood studios and recording companies in trying to keep pirated films, music and other content off its network — the first major carrier of Internet traffic to do so.

The San Antonio-based company started working last week with studios and record companies to develop anti-piracy technology that would target the most frequent offenders, said James W. Cicconi, an AT&T senior vice president.

This sounds really scary. The only conceivable way to implement this would be to inspect all packets going through their network. As an AT&T DSL subscriber, I certainly don’t want AT&T looking at the content of all my traffic.

A couple months ago, PBS’ Frontline had a great episode called “Spying on the Home Front” which covered AT&T’s wiretapping of United States citizens’ phones. You can watch the episode online for free on the Frontline Web site.