Oh, yeah, because the greedy trial lawyers want to bankrupt them. Well, so much for that theory.
This is just obscene.
The telecoms who are being sued for their cooperation in the government's illegal warrantless surveillance program have received billions in government contracts. According to Washington Technology magazine, Verizon received $1.3 billion, Sprint $839 million and AT&T $505 million in federal prime contract revenue for fiscal 2007, for a total of $2.6 billion. While the companies have been government contractors for a long time, it still represents a significant increase in revenue.
Telecom apologists like to suggest that the communications companies' motivation was not financial. As Judge Walker noted when examining EFF's allegations of dragnet surveillance: "AT&T cannot seriously contend that a reasonable entity in its position could have believed that the alleged domestic dragnet was legal." Yet, the prospect of $2.6 billion per year can go a long way to explaining why an industry might cooperate with a program far outside the limitations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), despite the difficulty of believing it was legal.
And they spied on Americans illegally because they are just so darned patriotic, they couldn't resist. Right.
They're gouging us in any number of ways, first in our monthly phone bills, then again in the federal taxes we pay, and just to put the cherry on top, they get to extort even more out of us, as Kagro has pointed out, by issuing (probably fake) threats to just let the terrorists blow the whole place up if they don't get their way.
At least, we'd all better hope their threats are fake. Otherwise they're not just extortionists. They're actual terrorists.
Nice double dipping gig, if you can get it. Not only are the telcos getting $2.6 billion in exchange for doing the helping BushCo out with this little illegal project, but now they're threatening to take the money and not render the services. They're actually saying they'll pocket the $2.6 billion--your money--and then still sell out to the terrorists if we don't also pick up their legal tab.
Yup, that pretty much defines patriotism in Bushspeak.
And what happens to a telco that decides not to buy into this corrupt bargain, like Qwest didn't? Your CEO gets dragged into federal court and threatened with prison time.