Can that Patriotic Telco Shit, Hatch

When Dodd filibustered the telco immunity bill, Republican douchebags like Jeff Sessions, Mitch McConnell, Jon Kyl and Orrin Hatch whimpered that the telcos were like Colonial Minutemen, rising selflessly to answer the call of a government that needed their help as we pissed our collective pants, blinkered after 9-11,9-11,9-11,9-11.

They all said that the domestic spying they bravely gave Cheney was merely for the love the bald eagle and the Twin Towers or somesuch.

Of course, Cheney started the spying before 9-11, so there’s that… ahem!  But the latest telco outrage is crazier. Well, how do you take your crow, guys? Poached in vomit? Coming right up:

Wiretap Is Cut Off After Feds Fail To Pay Telecom Spying Bills The FBI routinely failed to pay telecom companies promptly for providing phone and internet lines to the FBI’s impressive domestic surveillance architecture — resulting in at least one phone company cutting off a foreign intelligence wiretap until the FBI paid its bill, according to an audit released Thursday. The Justice Department’s Inspector General also found that telecom charges and invoices for surveillance overwhelmed the FBI’s ability to keep track of their bill and that one field office got a $66,000 bill from a carrier for unpaid surveillance work. Former FBI agent and now ACLU national security policy counsel Mike German directed his ire at the telecoms who happily played along with the government’s warrantless spying and let the FBI illegally get customer records following requests to get surveillance today with false promises to pay with a court order tomorrow. . “To put it bluntly it sounds as though the telecoms believe it when FBI says warrant is in the mail but not when they say the check is in the mail,” German said.Each field office has wiretap recording computers that are meshed together with all the other field offices and HQ through a secure fiber optic network operated by Sprint.

The telcos were doing it for the money.  Then, when Republicans (oh so good with the economy and money stuff, ain’t they!) stopped paying the bills, well, shit, the telcos shut down Bush’s spy ring.

Before the power went out, the FBI’s national security wiretapping software, captured 27,728,675 communication sessions, according to released FBI documents, but the documents do not define what a “session” consists of.

{If you want to learn more about FBI’s wiretap network and software, start with “Point, Click … Eavesdrop: How the FBI Wiretap Net Operates” and find out even more — including details on the FBI’s cell phone tracking vans — in “FBI E-Mail Shows Rift Over Warrantless Phone Records Grab.”}

Jay Rockefeller (D-AT&T)

Over at Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald kicked the crap out of West Virginia’s biggest Dick Cheney fan, Jello Jay Rockefeller.

Jay Rockefeller channels Dick Cheney’s fear-mongering to urge telecom amnesty

Leading telecom advocate Fred Hiatt this morning turned over his Washington Post Op-Ed page today to leading telecom advocate Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman, to explain why it is so “unfair and unwise” to allow telecoms to be sued for breaking the law. Just as all Bush followers do when they want to “justify” lawbreaking, Rockefeller’s entire defense is principally based on one argument: 9/11, 9/11, 9/11. Thus he melodramatically begins:

In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, the Bush administration had a choice: Aggressively pursue potential terrorists using existing laws or devise new, secret intelligence programs in uncharted legal waters. . .

Rockefeller’s claims that surveillance efforts will “come to a screeching halt” without his amnesty plan is nothing more than the sort of deceitful fear-mongering which the Bush administration has relentlessly churned out over the last six years.

Worse, still, Rockefeller worked out this retroactive amnesty boondoggle with Sith President Dick Cheney himself:

Last June, in a phone conversation with Vice President Dick Cheney, John D. Rockefeller IV, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, set down his conditions for revising the law governing the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping. Only when the committee got access to secret administration documents authorizing surveillance without court warrants, Mr. Rockefeller told the vice president, would it consider such legislation.

That vow paid off this week when, after some last-minute brinkmanship, the committee got to see the documents and then on Thursday night passed a bipartisan bill that offers a compromise between Congress and the Bush administration on the contentious eavesdropping issue. (NYTIMES)

What was the point of Rockefeller’s quid pro quo? What did he do with those secret documents? Dick.

Rockefeller and President Cheney had tangled previously over the N.S.A. domestic surveillance program. In July 2003, after a briefing for leaders of the Intelligence Committees from which staff members were barred, Mr. Rockefeller hand-wrote a protest note to the vice president, saying that as ”neither a technician nor an attorney,” he was not able to satisfy his concerns about the legality of eavesdropping without warrants.  He then locked the note in his safe.  I am not kidding.  A lot of good that did.

Why Retroactive Amnesty for Telcos Matters

clipped from chrisdodd.com Yesterday afternoon I sat down with AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein. He’s the technician who revealed that the NSA has secret rooms for sweeping up massive amounts of electronic communications on the internet. Klein is calling on the Senate to not grant telecommunications companies retroactive immunity. He’s also testifying to the scale of the Bush administration’s electronic surveillance: “Everything you could imagine you use the internet for flows through these cables. It’s not only international traffic, but a huge amount of domestic traffic too.” Watch the video of Klein talking about why he opposes retroactive immunity.

I turn to the indefatigable Matt Browner-Hamlin for the real deal on telecom immunity.

MetroNetIQ Loves Laura

Tech blog MetroNetIQ wrote: “Laura Scher, co-founder, chairperson and CEO of Working Assets, has written a couple of blogs that beg to be shared with you.Working Assets is a mobile and credit card company founded in 1985 “on the belief that building a business and building a better world are not mutually exclusive.” The company has donated over $50 million to progressive nonprofit groups. As CEO, Laura helped Working Assets grow to more than $100 million in annual revenue. Laura now is a lecturer at Stanford University, teaching “Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship” at the undergraduate level.

In early October, Laura wrote about the propriety of an Internet Service Provider that would reach into your emails and censor you, based on their determination of what is appropriate use of “their” network. HMMMMMM….did you read the fine print of your contract?”

Last week we witnessed Verizon trying to prevent a nonprofit from communicating with its own members because the company believed the content to be unsavory. Under the pressure of The New York Times front-page story and a storm of criticism, they caved.

Now it’s happened again: another communications company trying to limit communications of its subscribers. This time, AT&T has added a bizarre provision in its terms of service that its network subscribers – anyone using AT&T for internet service – cannot participate in “conduct that AT&T believes…tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.”

So the message from AT&T is: if you’re using AT&T for your e-mail, be careful what you say. Goodbye free speech. Hello, corporate censorship.

But let’s be clear: the only one doing real damage to AT&T . . . is AT&T’s own corporate policy .

Sadly, we have few alternative services. Over the past 10 years we have seen consolidation instead of competition. Where there were once 10 phone companies now there are but a measly four. Most of us have only two choices for Internet access and both are enormous companies. Our government has remained silent, if not complicit, as this consolidation has occurred. The FCC and Department of Justice have approved merger after merger, each of which reduced – not encouraged – competition.

clipped from www.metronetiq.com Remember, today’s “new” AT&T (which, not incidentally, has given over $1.8 million to Republican candidates) is really SBC, which, before it took over that telecom giant, gobbled up Ameritech, Pacific Bell, Bell South, and Cingular, among others. It’s noteworthy that these companies originated as regulated utilities, charged with the rights and responsibilities of providing a public good. Yet today the regulators, instead of protecting the citizens of this country, protect and abet the companies that are eliminating consumer choice through voracious mergers. — I leave you with one unsettling question. How does AT&T find out if we’re writing e-mails that are “damaging their name? ” Are they now tracking our in-boxes? If you read this and use AT&T for your Internet service, why not give this a try: e-mail this article to a friend. It’s the most subversive thing AT&T thinks you can do. October 5, 2007. AT&T: Out of My In-Box!

Also on HuffPo is another post that begs extensive blogquoting:

It’s been all over the news that in 2007, executives at Verizon and AT&T donated over $42,000 to Senator John D. Rockefeller, IV, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Prior to 2007, Rockefeller wasn’t getting any significant contributions from telecomm executives. But of course, prior to 2007, Rockefeller wasn’t pushing his committee to grant retroactive immunity to phone companies that helped the NSA with its secret, warrantless surveillance on America’s telephone calls.

There are so many reasons to be enraged by this.

As CEO of Working Assets, the socially responsible mobile and long distance company, I have watched for 15 years while big telecom “bought” monopoly power from Congress, from the White House and from the FCC. This is how they do business. Instead of building the best phone company, they buy politicians.

Instead of the vibrantly competitive telecom landscape promised by the deregulation of AT&T in 1984 and the Telecom Act of 1996, today we have a handful of telecommunications companies controlling legislation and policy, consolidating instead of innovating, and shutting out competitors. All with the blessing of the FCC.

Once upon a time the FCC took its role seriously, and required the phone companies to lease their networks. For a brief moment we had a competitive local telecom market offering a range of customized bundles and new features. Working Assets offered local service and doubled our donations for the customers who participated. But in due course the FCC bowed to the phone companies, and competitive local service simply vanished.

To add insult to injury, our politicians are cheap dates. For $42,000, these mega telecoms made a small but effective investment, given the magnitude of the lawsuits they are hoping to avoid, upwards of billions of dollars of damage. That’s cheaper than hiring a D.C. lawyer for a week. When an issue is below the radar screen, it’s easy to buy influence. But now that the issues have gone from thwarting competition to spying on Americans, I hope the public will start to pay attention, and hang up on the telecom companies’ on-going campaign to buy the law that suits them best.

I Don’t Trust Harry Reid To Do The Right Thing Either

Senator Dodd is hell-bent on making life difficult for the Senators in the Judicial Committee where a bill that would grant ex post facto immunity to lawbreaking mega corporations and the lawless Bush Administration. Nice.

clipped from chrisdodd.com Help Oppose Telecom Amnesty The first step is to make sure retroactive immunity doesn’t make it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee — where it will be considered shortly. If we can get it stripped there, it will have to be offered as an amendment to the overall bill where it will be a lot easier to get 41 votes against retroactive immunity than 41 to sustain my filibuster if necessary. Take a moment and call up members of the Judiciary Committee and ask them whether they will oppose any legislation that includes retroactive immunity. Let us know what they said, and join others in tracking our progress in stopping the provision in the Committee.

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No Amnesty for Bush’s Telcos