Verizon and I will no longer be doing business together

Now I feel morally compelled to drop Verizon. (Scott Horton, Harpers)

" And all of this occurs as another engineer has come forward to blow the whistle on the lawless surveillance of telecommunications by the Bush National Surveillance State.

Babak Pasdar, a computer security consultant, has gone public about his discovery of a mysterious “Quantico Circuit” while working for an unnamed major wireless carrier. Pasdar believes that this circuit gives the U.S. government direct, unfettered access to customers voice calls and data packets. These claims echo the disclosures from retired AT&T technician Mark Klein, who has described a “secret room” in an AT&T facility.

The name of the wireless carrier that collaborated in the installation of the “Quantico Circuit,” allowing the Bush Administration to spy on every phone conversation, text message and other communications it transmits, with no warrants or prior approval? Verizon.

Michael McConnell will of course insist that the intelligence community is looking only at foreign communications involving suspect terrorists. And that statement is a lie. In fact the technology employed allows the indiscriminate filtering of all communications of all types. And as to what portion is actually examined with any particularity, on that particular point, we’re told “trust us.” But why? I suggest we repose our trust elsewhere, namely: in the Constitution.

Surveillance is not outlawed. But it is bound to a system of constraints and checks. The Administration must justify its targets and must be subject to the oversight of a magistrate. That is what the Founding Fathers provided. And there is no reason to move from this system; what has transpired over the last six years provides only more evidence of its wisdom.

Damn! I just had a conversation about this a week ago with my Verizon rep on the phone when I was trying to get a text/data plan added to J's phone on our family plan. He didn't know anything about it so I filled him in. Since I knew Qwest was the only telecom who put up a stink I figured Verizon was one of them, however I didn't know for sure so I kept my head in the sand as long as I could. This is going to be a really tangled web to unweave but I have to do it. Their loss of a great customer for 7+ years, monthly bills always >$120 (mostly expensible business calls & data plan for my Treo. Too bad, so sad. Follow the law corporate overlords! So much for the free market... I'm taking my business elsewhere. Why worry about bad press from lawsuits when your business practices will drive your customers away first.

"We live in the age of the Great Betrayal, in an age in which too few are willing to state the obvious. There is still time to check the progress of tyrannical power, but the hour grows late, and the sounds of alarm no longer seem to register with a somnolent populace."