@Blob_Calder @mattblaze AT&T collected caller info for quite some time for various agencies. They are a conspiracy as a business.

@jbschirtzinger @Blob_Calder AT&T and the old Bell System definitely had an unhealthily cozy relationship with US intelligence and law enforcement, but the fact that it had a network of microwave towers, however spooky and unfamiliar looking, was not a "conspiracy". It was the phone company. Phone companies have technical infrastructure. That's how phone networks work.

@mattblaze @Blob_Calder Sure. The conspiracy is how the towers were used, at the very least, which was my point. Tapping the data of American phone calls across your infrastructure without permission from people is a conspiracy, plain and simple.

@jbschirtzinger @Blob_Calder No. The towers were used to provide a long distance telephone network. That's not a conspiracy. That's a phone system.

The microwave network had nothing to do with spying on people. AT&T cooperation with government data collection had nothing to do with nefarious use of microwave towers.

@mattblaze @Blob_Calder "Between early wired networks and today’s fiber optics sat a system of microwave relay towers transmitting information from coast to coast across the United States. Built in the early 1950s, this line-of-sight network spanned the continent using zig-zag patterns to avoid signal overlap. It conveyed phone conversations and television signals from the era of the Kennedy assassination through the resignation of Nixon."

https://99percentinvisible.org/article/vintage-skynet-atts-abandoned-long-lines-microwave-tower-network/

Facts are facts. You can say the gun didn't pull the trigger and say it didn't therefore kill anyone. That's technically true. However, no gun equals no murder with a gun. No tower equals no hanky panky with ALL THE above stuff.