As for Cox and Comcast, well, it sucks for them that Yahoo & Verizon decided to fight when they didn't. At least they were honest about selling your data...
To me the article reads as if these wiretaps are court ordered, which means that it's unfair to call this "selling you data". Even if they are allowed to charge a reasonable fee for the service, these companies have no legal means to avoid responding to these requests, so I wouldn't blame them for any abuses.
Which makes it all the more strange that two of them are fighting the release of this data. Their refusal makes this into a bigger story than it would have been otherwise, so any argument that they don't want to be publicly associated with this type of thing doesn't hold much water.
Could be that the legal departments just hate releasing internal data of any sort unless they're absolutely forced to, which is not altogether unreasonable.
I see what you're saying about it being unfair to call this selling data, but I can't help but look it at that way when they are charging $2500 dollars and up for tap. There is definitely a difference between being compensated for the time it takes to do something and profiting off of it, regardless of whether you had to do it or not.
Do you know exactly what's involved in placing a single tap? I don't. That it costs them $2500 in extra time across a large bureaucracy sounds reasonable to me.
Even though CALEA is legal and pretty reasonable IMO, I wouldn't put it past some muckraking bloggers to push the "Verizon is making money by spying on you, switch to $SOME_OTHER_TELCO" (which they won't mention is also CALEA compliant).
To me the article reads as if these wiretaps are court ordered, which means that it's unfair to call this "selling you data". Even if they are allowed to charge a reasonable fee for the service, these companies have no legal means to avoid responding to these requests, so I wouldn't blame them for any abuses.
Which makes it all the more strange that two of them are fighting the release of this data. Their refusal makes this into a bigger story than it would have been otherwise, so any argument that they don't want to be publicly associated with this type of thing doesn't hold much water.
Could be that the legal departments just hate releasing internal data of any sort unless they're absolutely forced to, which is not altogether unreasonable.