Nothing increases my confidence in the communication systems set up by private enterprise than the knowledge that the company I buy services from would give information on me to federal investigators without a court order.

Verizon Communications, the nation's second-largest telecom company, told congressional investigators that it has provided customers' telephone records to federal authorities in emergency cases without court orders hundreds of times since 2005.

...

From January 2005 to September 2007, Verizon provided data to federal authorities on an emergency basis 720 times... The records included Internet protocol addresses as well as phone data. In that period, Verizon turned over information a total of 94,000 times to federal authorities armed with a subpoena or court order, the letter said. The information was used for a range of criminal investigations, including kidnapping and child-predator cases and counter-terrorism investigations.

Verizon and AT&T said it was not their role to second-guess the legitimacy of emergency government requests.

You see, I WANT my service provider to second-guess the legitimacy of those emergency government requests. There are just too many instances of this administration investigating, arresting, torturing (excuse me, questioning with extreme methods), and maligning US Citizens, then finding nothing there and letting them return to lives that have been disrupted and destroyed. We call that "Homeland Security" (or "Protecting Der Reichstag").

If Verizon would say "get us a warrant," at least I would know that some judge has looked at the matter and not some mere DHS employee playing James Bond.

It makes me not want to be a Verizon customer... and, since the service up here in Hagerstown, MD, is piss poor anyway (that gang that follows folks around on the TV commercials calling themselves a "network" apparently don't know the way up US 70), I'm looking at new providers.

Unfortunately, the other one up here is AT&T.

Under The LobsterScope

Washington Post reports that Verizon Communications, says it has provided customers' telephone records to federal authorities in emergency cases without court orders hundreds of times since 2005.

Verizon also disclosed that the FBI using administrative subpoenas, sought information identifying not just a person making a call, but all the people that customer called, as well as the people those people called.

Andrew Cuomo is on  Verizon's case.

One of my favorite blogs is the consumerist, mostly because it's are always catching big companies being really stupid and nasty to normal people.  Here's a good example of Verizon Wireless being stupid, training their people badly, and charging 100 times what they promised.

Also, we might need to start putting pressure on Congress for net neutrality.  Discrimination is starting to happen, Comcast is restricting bandwidth to customers, and Robert Cringely is getting disturbing reports.

"I used to work at Time-Warner Cable's Road Runner High Speed HQ," wrote one reader, "and as of 2005, TWC marked all VoIP packets with the TOS bit turned to 1. TWC has 5 levels of priority, VoIP having the highest, router tables second, commercial services 3rd, Road Runner consumer 4th and everything else is classified as 'best effort'."

There will be action possibilities soon.  We will beat these people.

via sometimes snarky tech blog Engadget, the madness that is the technology patent system lately:

Verizon's patents may be illegitimate. Apparently the two patents in question, 6,104,711 (filed March 6, 1997) and 6,282,574 (filed February 24, 2000) may themselves use technology openly discussed and published by VocalTec back in 1996. In fact, it may also indirectly include technology input from the likes of IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Nortel, etc. made during the VoIP Forum in 1996, with the businesses' original intentions that this tech be used in future open standards.

This is a rather large deal.  Verizon is driving Vonage out of business by claiming in court that it has intellectual property rights over the internet.  With an upcoming spectrum fight at the FCC, it's worth keeping this absurd and monopolistic behavior in mind.

I'm really angry about net neutrality right now.  It's conventional wisdom that there will be no net neutrality legislation moved this cycle, which is completely fucking ridiculous.  There's an open universal wireless broadband and cell phone network that the US could implement in 2009, but the FCC's Kevin Martin really wants to give it away.  Meanwhile, the broadband providers are starting to impose cell phone like restrictions on their service, beginning with those lovely early termination fees that we all love.  And Google and the internet companies are laughably incompetent in their lobbying capacity (this comes from the leadership of those companies, who find DC dumb and dirty and neuter their lobbyists).

And then there's the CEO pay.  AT&T CEO Ed Whiteacre is going to get, according to Pensions and Investments (can't find link), "$158.4 million pension package when he retires as chairman and chief executive officer of AT&T Inc, the highest of any CEO."  And then there's Ivan Seidenberg, of Verizon, who made $109 million the last five despite a shareholder return of negative five percent.

The Communications Workers of America are going after Seidenberg not Whiteacre, because Whiteacre isn't trying to union-bust.  But in public policy matters, when Seidenberg or Whiteacre say 'jump', CWA says 'how high'.  Right now, the net neutrality fight is stalled because CWA is relying on their corporate masters rather than its natural allies, the progressive and consumer rights movements.  In Maryland, during a fight over a net neutrality bill, both CWA and Verizon showed up in force demanding that Maryland House of Delegates not even consider the bill because it had non-binding net neutrality findings in it.  Both the corporate and labor lobbyists flat-out lied.

The union opposed the bill because it would put company investment at risk, and thus put jobs at risk. He was also careful to note what a wonderful employer Verizon was because it provides health care to its workers. According to CWA's written statement: "Bills such as HB 1069 would cause the loss of good jobs with health care and other benefits in the state of Maryland."

Michael Dean, the president of the Maryland CWA state council, piled on by saying that Verizon provides "good paying jobs" laying fiber and he, too, didn't want to put those jobs at risk. (Of course, CWA's witnesses somehow didn't get around to testifying that they endorsed the part of the bill calling for reporting of broadband deployment.)

Verizon, of course, opposed the bill, as did Verizon Wireless, with their lobbyist, Robert Branson, reminding the Committee about the two centers the company has for developing innovation in Maryland. The not-so-subtle message: Don't screw this up.

This kind of strategic blindness is unnecessary.  CWA has its Speed Matters campaign, which we would wholly endorse if it just included net neutrality.  We in the progressive and consumer rights movement all want a universal broadband build-out done by public funds and a unionized workforce.  CWA wants the same.  And yet, the union is so afraid that they will lose jobs to cable that they will cozy up to Ivan Seidenberg on matters of public policy while blasting him publicly for excessive pay.  This might work if the public were on their side, but consumers don't care about unions when unions obviously don't care about them.  

I've had multiple union officials, when I tried explaining the net neutrality issue/CWA conflict say to me that I should just 'get over it' and work on good jobs for workers like a good progressive.  I guess we have more educating to do, but still, we have to solve this.  The AFL-CIO knows that CWA is on the wrong side of the net neutrality issue, but the various member unions can't move without CWA on board.  It's an obvious organizing problem, if corporate owners can move in to control the internet as they do every other form of media.  The labor movement knows this better than anyone, they should just do the right thing.  Arrgggh.

Or let me put it another way.  If you are a labor leader, who would you throw your lot in with?

Option one is the telecom industry.  Verizon is run by an evil management that is aggressively trying to union-bust.  AT&T won't be far behind when Whiteacre retires.  The cable industry is putting structural pressure on telecom, and everyone knows that America is behind the rest of the world as our corporate elites try to control the one free medium that exists.  

Option two is the progressive movement.  African-American political organizations want to make universal broadband a core civil rights plank, the progressive netroots is a growing force in the Democratic party, and consumers are completely fed-up with big telecom and aggressively bad service from wireless and cable companies.

There's more power in option two, and it's where CWA should be moving.  Let's get net neutrality going already.

For the moment, let's forget the important recent debate over whether easing the joining of labor unions is a net good or a net bad for both American workers and American business. Let's instead look at how a Fortune 50 like Verizon might attempt to rid itself of an unwelcomed business reality: many of its workers currently belong to a union, either the Communication Workers of America or the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Verizon is a sophisticated, modern telecom behemoth. It isn't likely to resort to blunt-instrument union-avoidance techniques like summarily firing workers who are pro-collective representation.

So what's Verizon to do? Verizon Inc. CEO Ivan Seidenberg is attempting to restructure the telecommunications industry, or at least where Verizon fits into that industry. Verizon's approach to the future is to grow the business while lessening the impact of unionization. How? By quarantining already the unionized technicians, sales people, and service reps of core Verizon from the rest of the growing employee population by building cordon sanitaires around their unit. The end result: unionized Verizon lacks the density that ideas need to spread effectively.

As it stands now, unionization at core Verizon is concentrated to workers who handle POTS -- that's Plain Old Telephone Service. The Seidenberg approach is to not let that high rate of unionization in core Verizon infect the rest of the company as it grows or acquires new units. Verizon has long tried to keep the unions out of Verizon Wireless. Now it's attempting to do the same with other units as they are added to the amalgamation. Case in point is Verizon Business, aka VZB. VZB used to be part of MCI until last year or so, and is now operated as a separate, non-unionized business unit under the umbrella of Verizon Inc. Verizon is moving more and more services and clients and accounts to VZB -- so rather than getting rid of existing union jobs exactly, they're just growing the areas where non-union jobs currently thrive.

As part of my work with the AFL-CIO I've been meeting with the CWA, who along with the IBEW are running a joint campaign to organize about 400 VZB techs in the northeast. About 150 are right here in New York City. The VZB techs have signed cards saying that they want to join the union. Those cards were verified by John Kerry, Stephen Lynch, John Tierney, and others (watch the video). Verizon won't recognize them. Senators Clinton, Kerry, Edwards, and Schumer, and Reps. Slaughter, Weiner, and Nadler and others have pushed the company to recognize the employees' choice. Of course, were the Employee Free Choice Act to pass the Senate and become law, that card check would be enough to form a union here.

A big part of this picture is that Verizon is aiming to compete with the cable companies, particularly via FiOS, Verizon's fiber-optic cable service to the home. FiOS means super-speedy broadband Internet. (Like up to 50 Mbps under ideal conditions. At that speed I could fully download the next movie in my Netflix queue, which happens right at the minute to be "Harlan County, USA," in about 5 minutes.)

But FiOS also means that Verizon can compete with the cable cos in delivering custom digital television content. Not to draw too much into this discussion, but the buildout of resource-intense last 100-yards technologies like FiOS is one of the things that telecoms cite when they argue against net neutrality. Neutrality (they argue) threatens their ability to control their own revenue streams, and the buildout of FiOS is 'spensive, something like $18 billion.

So Verizon wants to compete with the cable folks. But whereas the rate of unionization in the phone-line-in-the-ground business is around 90%, it's at just about 4% in the cable industry. By comparison, it's at something like 35% in the wireless industry, where Verizon also competes. But even in wireless there are other models. Cingular (now AT&T Wireless) has adopted a stance of neutrality when its workers want to join a union, and something more than half of its workers are unionized. Verizon's different approach means that Verizon Wireless and Verizon wireline are kept deliberately separate, including distinct websites at verizon.com and verizonwireless.com. Verizon customer service reps for the wireless service can't answer a question about wireline services. Instead, they'll transfer you to a unionized rep. Quarantined, see?

As I learn about labor, it seems to me that the whole field of union-avoidance is self-educating, in a way. Best practices get studied and copied. If Verizon is successful in quarantining its union workers as it diversifies and grows, then I'm thinking we'll see these techniques learned from and replicated by other employers in the same boat.