The multidisciplinary challenge of teaching FISA
Tue Feb 26, 2008 at 11:15:03 PM PDT
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.
Multidisciplinary ignorance is the trump card of the telcom lobby, and it took a while to explain what happened after Nixon, why the FISA court was set up, how easy it was to get a warrant, and how few warrants have been turned down.
I explained National Security Letters, and how Qwest didn't buckle when AT&T and Verizon did, and the terrible outcome for the Qwest chief executive who opted for obeying the law.
But I started to see the glimmer of understanding begin when I asked how we knew what the government was listening to. How can we assure ourselves that they are at least as interested in people who can bomb them out of power as vote them out.
This isn't that the government lacks the power to wiretap when they need to. They can even begin a wiretap at their whim and ask for the warrant later. But they didn't do that.
I reminded him of the powerful legal department at his company, and that they are not stupid. Then I asked about what had happened in his company during the time they were saying "Yes" to Uncle Sam in a way that they are now demanding protection for.
Didn't AT&T come in and change the name on the door from BellSouth? Didn't they lay off a lot of the longer term employees? And didn't they need the government's blessing to do that?
So if they gamed the system and listened into people's conversations when they knew better so that the government wouldn't ask tough questions about their business model or say no, you can't merge and lay those people off, then shouldn't they at least have to answer questions about it?
How many people get immunity from BellSouth's business decisions? Shouldn't it be everybody, or nobody?
Yes, I see your point, he said. I think I changed his mind. And I'd love to be a fly on the wall the next time he's fed the AT&T company line about Barack Obama and those nasty lawsuits against the patriotic phone companies.
This is going to be a tough election. These are complex issues and as a people we've come to demand simple solutions, and we're fresh out of those.
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