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.

McCarthyism 2.0

Technology blog Mashable looks through an FBI document dump and explains how AT&T got so good at discarding their customers’ personal rights. The layman’s explanation seems to be that by use of several seemingly simple data-mining algorithms, they scan through call logs and track the connections between phone numbers.

clipped from mashable.com Essentially, if you talk to someone who talks to terrorists, your phone records could be in scrutiny. The research for this technology was done pre-2000, in an effort by AT&T to curtail those who made fraudulent credit-card calls, but has since been re-applied by the FBI to discern new people of interest.� Gone are the days of the McCarthy era, when folks were solicited to name names – your phone company now (at no extra cost to you!) provides this service for you.

What Would You Like To Ask Verizon

IPDI’s Deputy Director said:

I hope all will attend the event, and I hope some of those dissenting voices will approach us with ideas for future events. Send your questions and ideas to ipdi@ipdi.org.

I have 10 questions for Verizon.
You?

clipped from techdailydose.nationaljournal.com Internet Institute Causes Broadband Policy Stir A storm is brewing over at George Washington University’s Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet’s decision to invite telecommunications giant Verizon to engage in a discussion next Friday on broadband deployment. The think tank got an avalanche of e-mails from folks on its subscription list — and not all were RSVPs. There were “a number of angry, outraged writers, some of whom question the integrity of IPDI for hosting a big, bad company like Verizon for a discussion about broadband,” the group said.

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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How Verizon Neglects Communities, Fails to Provide Good Jobs

A report released today by reveals how telecom industry giant Verizon Communications is using a heavy arsenal of intimidation and harassment to fight against workers who are trying to form a union to improve their wages, benefits and working conditions.

Read the whole article at the AFL-CIO blog.

clipped from blog.aflcio.org A report released today by American Rights at Work reveals how telecom industry giant Verizon Communications is using a heavy arsenal of intimidation and harassment to fight against workers who are trying to form a union to improve their wages, benefits and working conditions. The report, Broken Promises: Verizon Neglects its Commitment to Provide Good Jobs and Quality Service, by the nonprofit labor policy and advocacy group, provides first-hand accounts of management’s abusive and intimidating behavior toward Verizon Business technicians who are trying to organize through the Communication Workers of America (CWA) and the Electrical Workers (IBEW).�� Verizon faces National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) hearings shortly for its anti-union tactics in this and another Verizon Business location in Pennsylvania.�

What Is It Called When Corporations Meld With Government?

Oh, that’s right, it’s an F word that I can’t say or else I’m crazy.

clipped from www.workingassetsblog.com Do they teach this in Government 101 yet? Executives at the two biggest phone companies contributed more than $42,000 in political donations to Senator John D. Rockefeller IV this year while seeking his support for legal immunity for businesses participating in National Security Agency eavesdropping. The surge in contributions came from a Who’s Who of executives at the companies, AT&T and Verizon, starting with the chief executives and including at least 50 executives and lawyers at the two utilities, according to campaign finance reports. Bush’s domestic spying program was illegal and these companies participated, willingly. They didn’t have to. They could have fought it — not just because it would have been right or Constitutional to fight it, but because they broke the law by not fighting it. So now they fight in their own way: with cash. And we have to fight in our own way: take action and tell your friend…it’s time to hold people accountable for breaking the law.

A Video from GoLeft.tv

http://goleft.tv/view.asp?v=619

Why Verizon Loves to Spy

clipped from www.rawstory.com One of the highest-level executives at Verizon Communications—second largest of the three major telecommunications firms originally alleged to be providing the National Security Agency with customer phone records under contract and without a warrant—has strong, decades-long ties to Central Intelligence, Congress and the Department of Justice Verizon Executive Vice President and General Counsel William P. Barr began his career as an analyst for the CIA in the mid 1970s, and advanced to become an assistant legislative counsel for the agency. He has also held a number of other public positions since then, including those of domestic policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan and even U.S. Attorney General under George Herbert Walker Bush. That testimony reveals a record of sympathy with the sorts of legally contentious activities the NSA is alleged to be conducting with its wiretapping and data mining programs.

Testifying at the Hearing of the Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the United States Intelligence Community, Barr advocated the use of intelligence information in domestic law enforcement proceedings in cases of suspected terrorism.Once a snoop always a snoop.

Verizon Shows Its Authoritarian Colors

clipped from www.nytimes.com Late last month, Verizon Wireless denied an application from Naral Pro-Choice America, a reproductive rights group, for a “short code,” a few numbers that a mobile phone user can use to subscribe to a particular source of text messages. Verizon said its policy was to refuse “issue oriented” text-messaging programs from any group that “seeks to promote an agenda or distribute content that, in its discretion, may be seen as controversial or unsavory to any of our users.” The policy also said political candidates may be granted short codes if the content is, “in VZW’s sole discretion, not issue-oriented or controversial in nature.”

The New York Times continued: “Leave aside for the moment the sorry spectacle of a major American company aiming to make campaigns even more substance-free than they already are. The Verizon policy was textbook censorship. Any government that tried it would be rightly labeled authoritarian. The First Amendment prohibits the United States government from anything approaching that sort of restriction.”If Verizon had attempted it on normal phone lines, it would have been violating common carrier laws that bar interference with voice transmissions. Unfortunately, those laws do not apply to text messaging.

Without anything in their way, they showed their true authoritarian colors.

No Amnesty for Bush’s Telcos