But basically all American tele operators are selling this data to private corporations already, it is a standard contract there is no need to blackmail to buy data then. The only strange thing here is that they try to hide this project, not that it is ongoing.

And I'm pretty sure that most corporations that sells your call data to other private corporations sees no issue to also sell it to the government. To them it is just another customer.

Nope. Private operators cannot access this data. American telcos are heavily regulated. This falls under customer private network information (CPNI) to be shared only with the owner of the data(the customer) or with law enforcement (and internal use but not for commercial use).

> This falls under customer private network information (CPNI)

Any source for that being the case here? CPNI is partially protected, but subsets of it can be freely shared and sold by companies. Do you have a link showing the data police accesses here goes under the protected category and not just the freely available category?

Private companies can access the following according to the CPNI wikipedia, parts of it can only be shared inside the company but a very large part like location data and URLS and demographic data can be sold freely:

> Verizon shares CPNI "among our affiliates and parent companies (including Vodafone) and their subsidiaries unless you advise us not to". and states that it shares "URLs (such as search terms) of websites you visit when you use our wireless service, the location of your device ("location information"), and your use of [Application software [applications] and features" as well as other "information about your use of Verizon products and services (such as data and calling features, device type, and amount of use), as well as demographic and interest categories (such as gender, age range, sports fan, frequent diner, or pet owner)" with other non-affiliated companies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_proprietary_network_i...