AT&T And Censorship?

I think it's worth reading Slate's article about what AT&T is preparing to do (snippets below).

...last week AT&T announced that it is seriously considering plans to examine all the traffic it carries for potential violations of U.S. intellectual property laws.

Once AT&T gets in the business of picking and choosing what content travels over its network, while the law is not entirely clear, it runs a serious risk of losing its all-important immunity. An Internet provider voluntarily giving up copyright immunity is like an astronaut on the moon taking off his space suit. As the world's largest gatekeeper, AT&T would immediately become the world's largest target for copyright infringement lawsuits.

Very very odd times these are. If you thought the RIAA was out of touch going after consumers of it's own music with very little or no proof that they had actually committed copyright infringement, this goes a step further. Why AT&T would care about copyright infringement is beyond me unless someone has made it worth their while to police their traffic, which evidently includes most of the data networks we're all using.

This is the head of the tech blog site Gizmodo, on a program funded by AT&T and aired exclusively on their tech channel. He decides to hijack things and ask some questions upfront before the producers realize what's happening and cut the conversation off.