Jeffrey Quick's Blog

Phone spying in a free market

A loonyterian from a Yahoo list (name withheld to protect the guilty) wrote:

Concerning the telephone records, this should be a contractual
matter between consumers and telephone companies. The Feds
should have to pay for the records, thus enabling companies
that shared their records to offer lower rates. If only a few
companies didn't share their records (with the Feds),
that would concentrate suspicious characters in such
companies, which would be one factor in getting probable
cause search warrants.

So it's OK to sell me down the river, as long as the sales happen in a free market? Uh-uh. Let me describe your free market, as it is. I have ONE choice of land line/internet at home: Verizon. That hurt going in, long before this, because of the way they treated Jeffrey Jordan. I've got Net at work, but my wife doesn't; she has cell, and I don't yet. So it's no phone, or play with Verizon. I could switch our LD carrier to Qwest, but it's scarcely worth it: our plan has 30 minutes of LD per month, and we usually don't use it all.

Now, let's look at "Feds paying for the records". Yeah, right. The Feds alone aren't going to make a market in phone records. They'll eminent domain them, or pay some lowball figure. If they're going to pay a competitive market rate, that will be established by ALL KINDS OF OTHER NOSY PEOPLE wanting to know who I called. And if they DO buy the info instead of stealing it, it will be because they STOLE MONEY FROM ME to do it. In short, I'm screwed out of info that is NONE OF THEIR BUSINESS. And why would they offer me lower rates to sell me, when most Americans DON'T CARE that the Feds are tracking their calls? Did the 1001 companies who ALREADY trade in my consumer habits ever ask permission or offer me a better deal for saying Yes?

No, this is what needs to happen: Americans need to QUIT PAYING THEIR PHONE BILLS until an independent party can verify that the corporations are not being NSA's catamites. Having their cash flow come to a screeching halt will show them who their bosses really are. It won't happen, because most don't care, and Gods forbid they might get their credit rating affected or their blab service disconnected.

And if the Commies are right and business owns the government, why did the telcos bend over anyway?

This reminds me so much of the Reagan years, when Reason magazine printed stories about all the benefits that could accrue from black boxes in our cars enabling time-sensitive pricing of toll roads. Now we've got Oregon experimenting with it to collect road taxes, and any idiot can see that the government knowing where you drive is A Bad Idea.