Good Americans

The lawlessness of the rulers of our country is on full display as the Congress considers whether to grant immunity to the nation's telephone companies for their blatant violations of the law (with the exception of Qwest) by providing the government with warrant-less access to untold numbers of telephone records.

By rulers, I mean the multi-million-dollar salaried CEOs of some of the world's largest telecoms, the leadership of the Democratic House and Senate, and of course, President Bush and the executive branch, especially the so-called Justice Department.

Are we all Good Americans?

Let's say you're the CEO of a telecom, an industry where the federal government doles out multi-billion dollar contracts. And the nice man from the government walks in to your office and says, oh by the way, we need to do some wiretaps right now, we don't have time to get warrants, and thank you very much.

If you're the head of Verizon or AT&T, no problem.

First a little perspective. It's not as if the government has had any difficulty getting warrants. According to the Washington Post today, Verizon "turned over information a total of 94,000 times to federal authorities armed with a subpoena or court order" between January 2005 to September 2007.

But that wasn't good enough for George Bush. During this same time period, Verizon turned over records 720 times without a warrant.

How does a Good American justify this kind of behavior? Here's what AT&T senior executive vice president and general counsel Wayne Watts wrote in a letter to three Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is investigating this matter:

"Public officials, not private businessmen, must ultimately be responsible for whether the legal judgments underlying authorized surveillance activities turn out to be right or wrong legally or politically. Telecommunications carriers have a part to play in guarding against official abuses, but it is necessarily a modest one."

Modest, indeed. A representative of the government comes and asks you to do something that you know is illegal under existing law, a law with whose operation you are intimately familiar with. (Remember Verizon's 94,000 legal acts of compliance.)

The failure to refuse is the road to tyranny.

And yet, even in the gathering darkness, we find one CEO who says no, Joe Nacchio, former CEO of Quest. Now Joe is not, on the face of it, the most savory of CEOs. He was tried and convicted last spring for 19 counts of insider trading for $52 million in stock sales, and is facing a six-year prison sentence.

But when the federal agents asked for permission to use Quest's equipment to conduct illegal wiretapping, Joe said no. And Joe was saying NO before 9/11. The Rocky Mountain News reports that Nacchio wanted to introduce evidence about his dealings with the government about his experiences in rejecting the government's requests, which he thought were illegal.

Just say no. That's all it takes to defend the Constitution in such situations.

The other phone companies are now spending millions lobbying Congress to provide them with some kind of retroactive legal immunity against lawsuits from angry customers, a kind of Congressional pardon, if you would. And just for good measure, Bush has announced that he will veto any legislation dealing with this wiretap issue if it does not include retroactive legal immunity.

Bush has already signaled his willingness to play one final trump card, intervening to get lawsuits already underway against the telecoms thrown out of court because continuing the cases would result in the revelation of "state secrets." Right.

So now we need a bunch of judges who will say No to Bush's claim of unlimited tyrannical executive powers. (It wouldn't hurt if there were a bunch of Congress critters who would say NO and bring the work of the chambers to a halt until Bush had been impeached and removed from office.)

In the end, depending on a rare corporate executive like Joe Nacchio, or a handful of judges, or even a few hundreds Reps and Senators to hold the line for freedom is asking too much from too few. Tyrants win when they can pick off the opposition one by one, and that's the country we live in today, where too many Good Americans stand silent.