One of our digital circuits went down yesterday, and I spent a fair amount of time talking with an AT&T digital circuit technician after he found and corrected the physical problem, but before the switch-house cleared it and processed the paperwork.
Talk turned to politics, and then to Obama, and he surprised me when he shared his concern that Obama supported suing the phone companies. This issue hit home with him and was a dealbreaker, and I smelled the faint scent of the AT&T party line.
The more we talked about it, the more the missing piece became clear. The phone company had been patriotic, a team player, a good citizen. They shouldn't be punished for this; it was a windfall for the lawyers and a landmine for the phone companies and the ratepayers.
The missing piece? Though he understood far more about the business of telephony than most any average joe, he had never heard of the FISA court. The false "you need a warrant" admonition from Bush was either forgotten or never understood.
And I realized why our incremental victories are so tentative and temporary, and how tenacious we have to be fighting for these multidisciplinary issues like telcom immunity and net neutrality.
Did I win him over? Take the jump.
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