I am now a Qwest customer. It was painless. And it was the right thing to do.
Here in No Cal, the old phone monopoly, AT&T, is now the name of the new phone monopoly. (Hopefully they'll stick with that for a while and stop renaming the damn ballpark, but that's another issue.) And it looks like AT&T has been submitting all my call records to Bush's KGB. And maybe worse.
-- more --
Now I really don't know much about Qwest. These days you really can't be surprised if any given company is cooking their books and giving gobs of money to the RNC, and in fact, according to BuyBlue.org,
Qwest gives more money to Republicans than Democrats by a two to one margin. Unfortunately, that looks to be
par for the course in that industry. But the company
talks a good game, ethically speaking,and it did
refuse to give its customers' data to the KGB, and for that they deserve to be rewarded. I'm under contract, so I can't use their cell service or high-speed web access - for now - but I sure as hell can use them for long distance.
I can't wait for the AT&T rep to call and try to talk me out of making the change.
You can too, right here: www.qwest.com
From the NYTimes, linked above, here's a little more detail on Qwest's refusal to play ball:
WASHINGTON, May 12 -- The telecommunications company Qwest turned down requests by the National Security Agency for private telephone records because it concluded that doing so would violate federal privacy laws, a lawyer for the telephone company's former chief executive said today.
In a statement released this morning, the lawyer said that the former chief executive, Joseph N. Nacchio, made the decision after asking whether "a warrant or other legal process had been secured in support of that request."
Mr. Nacchio learned that no warrant had been granted and that there was a "disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process," said the lawyer, Herbert J. Stern. As a result, the statement said, Mr. Nacchio concluded that "the requests violated the privacy requirements of the Telecommunications Act."