Telecoms give out customer records

Does anyone actually have good feelings towards telecoms? I think they're more in the category of necessary evils.

Bold and italics are mine.

Verizon admitted that it had provided the telephone records of its customers to federal authorities on hundreds of occasions since 2005 and did so without having received any court orders.

From January 2005 to September 2007, Verizon gave personal data to federal authorities, without legal cover, 720 times. That works out to at least once every working day. [...] The company also said it turned over information to authorities armed with court orders or subpoenas a total of 94,000 times during that same two-year period.

Verizon said police and intelligence agencies also asked not only for information about the person making the call, but on all the people that person called and the names of all the people these recipients called as well. [...]

The country's largest carrier, AT&T, also replied to the committee's requests. The telephone giant provided no detail of its surveillance activities but it agreed with Verizon that telephone companies were not equipped nor prepared to determine the legitimacy of federal requests for customer information [...] Legal experts say that is nonsense since, if lives are at stake, there is a provision in the law that gives the feds the ability to get a legal tap as quickly as they want. [...]

An executive of Qwest, another American telecom provider, has charged that his company was punished by the Bush administration after it questioned the legality of some requests being made of it by the National Security Agency. The NSA is the country's electronic spymaster. [...] In 2006, the newspaper USA Today reported that the NSA was collecting the phone records of tens of millions of Americans with the co-operation of the telephone companies. It reported that Qwest refused to go along with these efforts and expressed concern that the activity was illegal. [...]

On Wednesday, in the op-ed pages of the Washington Post, a column written by the presidents of NARAL Pro-Choice America and the Christian Coalition of America — two unlikely colleagues — set out a mutual complaint.

Both were objecting to an initial Verizon decision to deny the pro-choice group a text-message service that would allow those who wished to receive news updates from NARAL (an acronym of National Abortion Rights Action League) after typing in a five-digit code.

This censorship was exposed in the New York Times and Verizon eventually backed down. But the two presidents, NARAL's Nancy Keenan and Christian Coalition's Roberta Combs wrote, "We are on the opposite sides of almost every issue. But when it comes to the fundamental right of citizens to participate in the political process, we're united and very, very worried." -- CBC News.

Me too. Next year's presidential election can't come soon enough.