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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (23837)	11/7/2007 1:20:35 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

Telecom Patriots Give them Presidential Medals of Freedom. Sunday, November 4, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT The latest Presidential Medals of Freedom will be presented Monday, and the eight on this year's list are all deserving. They include Brian Lamb, the founder of C-Span, and Oscar Elias Biscet, the Cuban human rights activist who won't be able to accept in person because he's in one of Fidel Castro's prisons. But here are two suggestions for the next list: CEOs Randall L. Stephenson and Ivan Seidenberg, of AT&T and Verizon, respectively. They deserve recognition not so much in their own right but as representatives of the telecom companies that cooperated with the federal government's terrorist surveillance program in the weeks immediately after 9/11. Changing technology means that the U.S. National Security Agency can no longer monitor terrorist communications merely by pulling microwaves from the air. Our world of packet switching and fiber cable means that the NSA needs access to the telephone company switching networks to track terrorist plans. When President Bush and the Attorney General requested such cooperation in late 2001, the companies responded despite what they must have known was some legal risk if the public's terrorism fears subsided. And, sure enough, the companies now find themselves the target of lawsuits for having cooperated in this surveillance. Congress may or may not provide them with legal immunity from these suits, and if they don't get it the companies could face a decade of legal harassment and expense before they ultimately prevail. One irony is that Joseph Nacchio, the former CEO of Qwest Communications International who was convicted of insider trading, is now being widely praised in the press because he says he was punished by the government for refusing to cooperate with a surveillance program before 9/11. The feds deny any link. America would be a more dangerous place if businesses refused to help protect America because they feared a lawsuit, or negative publicity. We hear a lot from critics that corporations need to be more public spirited, and this is a case in which they clearly were. opinionjournal.com