Supreme Court Helps AT&T, Verizon Avoid Accountability For Spying On Your Every Movement

We’ve noted for years how wireless companies were at the forefront of over-collecting your sensitive daily movement data, then selling access to any nitwit with two nickels to rub together. That resulted in no limit of scandals from stalkers using the data to spy on women, to law enforcement (and people pretending to be law enforcement) using it to track peoples’ movement.

Earlier this year, after four years of legal wrangling and delays (caused in part by the telecom industry’s sleazy attack on the Gigi Sohn FCC nomination), the FCC announced they had voted to finally formalize $192 Million in fines against Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile.

The fines were likely a pittance compared to the money the three companies made off of location data sales, but at least it was something. Now those efforts are at risk thanks to, you guessed it, The Supreme Court and Trumpism. All three companies are arguing in court that recent Supreme Court rulings mean the FCC doesn’t actually have the authority to do, well, anything anymore:

“Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile are continuing their fight against fines for selling user location data, with two of the big three carriers submitting new court briefs arguing that the Federal Communications Commission can’t punish them.”

I’ve noted repeatedly how several recent Supreme Court rulings, most notably Loper Bright, will result in most U.S. corporations insisting that effectively all federal consumer protection efforts are now illegal. That’s going to result in untold legal chaos and widespread consumer protection, public safety, labor, and environmental harms across every industry that touches every corner of your life.

There’s a segment of folks who think that’s hyperbole or that the result won’t be quite that bad. But every time you turn around you find another instance of a company leveraging recent Supreme Court rulings to defang corporate oversight (which despite a lot of pretense, was precisely what was intended).

In this case, the wireless companies are leveraging the Supreme Court’s June 2024 ruling in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, which confirmed a Trumplican Fifth Circuit order stating that “when the SEC seeks civil penalties against a defendant for securities fraud, the Seventh Amendment entitles the defendant to a jury trial.” That order wasn’t in place when the FCC first proposed its fines:

“The FCC disputed the 5th Circuit ruling, saying among other things that Supreme Court precedent made clear that “Congress can assign matters involving public rights to adjudication by an administrative agency ‘even if the Seventh Amendment would have required a jury where the adjudication of those rights is assigned to a federal court of law instead.”

There’s always a lot of bullshit logic Trumplicans have used to prop up our corrupt Supreme Court’s dismantling of corporate oversight. Most notably that this is just all some sort of good faith effort to rebalance institutional power and rein in regulators that had somehow been running amok (you’re to ignore that most U.S. regulators can barely find where they put their pants on a good day).

But as you can see here (and will be seeing repeatedly and often in vivid and painful detail), the goal really is to create flimsy framework effectively arguing that all federal consumer protection efforts, however basic, are now illegal. It’s not going to be subtle, it absolutely is going to kill people at scale, and the majority of Trump supporters are utterly oblivious to what they’ve been supporting.

In this case, the FCC was trying to uphold the most minimal standards of accountability possible, and even that wasn’t allowable under this new regulatory paradigm.

All is not lost: most consumer protection battles will now shift to the states. But if you currently live in a state where consumer, labor, and environmental protections were already out of fashion, you’re going to be repeatedly and painfully finding yourself shit out of luck. It would have been nice if election season journalism had tried to make it clear of the kind of stakes we’re talking about here.