First, let me begin by saying that as a child of the sixties and seventies I fought telecom immunity tooth-and-nail. But there is nothing that would prevent me from voting for Barack Obama come November. He is just following Marketing 101: First, energize the innovators and early adopters to finance the nomination, then go after the early and late majority with a larger base of support, because without them, you won’t get to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue where you can do some real good. As one of those progressive early adopters (after all, he’s my senator), I’m emotionally hurt by his stance on FISA, but as a long-time marketing executive, I agree wholeheartedly with his decisions and tactics. It may come as a shock to some, but the majority of Americans don’t care whether the government spied on them, and the neocons will play the fear card every time to undermine a stance on civil liberties. Obama is doing exactly what I would do in his position.
[Consumer Action Plan below the fold]
Yet it doesn't change the fact that we are very disturbed at the prospect of telecom immunity being attached to the current FISA bill. We all know that the civil lawsuits would accomplish two tasks: first, uncover more details about the illegal wiretapping (I won’t use the word “warrantless” because it sounds like Frank Luntz language, and a Federal judge in California just confirmed my point), and second, make the greedy SOBs who willfully violated the Fourth Amendment pay for their misdeeds.
If the civil lawsuits are prevented from going forward, we can’t do much about the evidentiary aspects, but we can make them pay for shredding the Constitution. Having spent many years in the development and marketing of software for the telecoms, here’s my action plan:
If you are receiving an electronic bill, go back to paper. This will cost your service provider approximately $1-2 per month. And if your state commerce commission protects your ability to receive duplicate copies of your bill for free, request them every month. That’s right - request a duplicate bill every month. This costs less than generating the initial bill, but it still costs for paper, printing, and postage. I’ve already done this, and now I’m receiving regular messages from Verizon about the advantages of “going paperless.” (Fat chance, Gekko the Great. Keep that wallet open, because it gets better.)
Every month make an inquiry about your bill, whether a line charge, tax item, or call detail record, through the U.S. Postal Service. Nowadays telecoms have elaborate voice-response systems that will prevent you from ever reaching a human being, and even if you do manage to get the secret number, you will be on hold for an indeterminate length of time. So send a postcard through the mail to their customer service mailing address, which then must be handled by a real human being and responded to in accordance with your state consumer protection laws. It may cost you the price of a postcard (currently $0.27), but it will cost them $8-15 at a minimum to respond.
Many telecoms will even try to make it difficult to obtain their mailing address. In that case, contact your state commerce commission and they will get it for you. After all, these are highly regulated companies who must tell the authorities certain information, not the least of which is customer service contact details.
If you’ve sent a postcard inquiry and they don’t respond in a reasonable timeframe, file a complaint with your state commerce commission and the Federal Communications Commission. Then it will really cost them to respond, because middle management and the legal department may become involved.
The situation with FISA is not ideal, but I feel so much better knowing that the profits they made from spying on innocent citizens in America may be swallowed up by providing legally-mandated services to those same people. If enough of us engage in these acts of "consumer disobedience," the telecoms that trashed our rights will learn that quid pro quo is a bitch.