Oh, by the way, that appears to be the unitary signal lines, so your voice and internet data may of necessity be stripped at the same time your call numbers are being pulled. You have the word of someone or other that the voice data is not being sent through a computer someplace.
I take my lesson from events surrounding South Africa, namely corporate pressure and divestiture. If the stockholders of SCT (String and Cans Telephone) want their corporate officers to support wiretapping, make them pay the price where it matters, namely in their brokerage accounts. If large numbers of people change their telco, profits are harmed. If large numbers of people or their pension funds divest their stock, share prices will fall.
My proposal is severalfold, all intended to make it worthwhile for the major telephone companies to litigate and press Congress to get them out of their bad deals.
One side of the approach is to attempt to replace unAmerican Directors and Corporate officers who support wiretapping with patriotic Americans who love their Constitution and therefore oppose warrantless Republican wiretapping. Of course, if you own stock you can attempt to organize and support insurgent slates. More important, if you are in a pension fund or own mutual fund shares you can pressure the peopel running the fund to make the change, because the alternative is financially unsound. Most pension funds have a lot more shares than most Kossacks, so the pressure they can generate is larger than the pressure we can generate.
The other side of the approach is to push for divestiture of telco stock as a morally hazardous investment. This is particularly true if you have invested in a 'socially conscious' pension or mutual fund, because you can then make the case that investing in a local telco that cooperates with immoral Republican wiretapping schemes is socially somnolent.
If you are in a nonprofit whose pension passes through TIAA-CREF or any number of other firms, you elect the directors, and can exert pressure more directly. You can contact the people you elected. You can submit motions for the shareholders. You can even in some cases organize a competing slate of Directors who will be more agreeable with the moral position than the current directors. There are more drastic approaches, because at some point it will ebcome apparent that cooperating with the Republicans' peepie-poachie friends was not a good way to carry out fiduciary responsibility to the account holders.
Your mileage may vary
George Phillies
http://www.phillies2008.com
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