I actually give quite a few shits about AT&T, and distrust them to this day. As for selling out user privacy being worth more than the possible loss of credibility, maybe I'll put a sniffer between my Windows box and the internet to see what goes through.
A don't trust nor like AT&T, but the same goes for the other carriers as well. It's not going to impact who I do business with, but that's mostly because I don't have many options an not much choice in the matter anyway due to how peering works. Doubtless this was analyzed by a marketing department within the organization. In the San Francisco incident (and probably most others) it is the government who is almost completely to blame anyway. AT&T's CEO didn't wake up one day and decide he wanted to spy on people. The idea, and who knows how much of what kind or pressure, was brought to bear on them.
On top of that, for every soul who is annoyed at AT&T's malfeasance there are five more who consider them heroes for helping to kill Bin Laden.
With respect to packet snooping between my Windows box and the net, I've done it on occasion. It's interesting but tedious. And like I said, I would anticipate that people who have their shit together would be passing data back in a way which would be hard to recognize via simplistic methods of analyzing discrete packets. I mean it is not my forte', but I would certainly be deigning root kit keystroke loggers to cache data and embed it in other expected transfers (like update scans and what-not.)
