Stop AT&T From Killing Your Grandmother

She lives somewhere with crummy cell service, if any at all, right?  The only way she can call 911 in an emergency is her prehistoric land line telephone, right?

AT&T wants to kill her.  Right now. And the Kentucky General Assembly is getting ready to let AT&T do it.

Why?  Because grandma's landline does not deliver billions in profits to AT&T. Grandma's landline might actually cost one of the world's most disgustingly rich corporations a few pennies to keep connected.

And we can't have a zillionaire corporation losing entire pennies on your pathetic rural grandmother who should be in a nursing home anyway.

From the Kentucky Resources Council:

HOUSE COMMITTEE APPROVES AT&T BILL - YOUR HELP NEEDED AGAIN TO PROTECT BASIC RELIABLE PHONE SERVICE!

On Thursday, February 5, the House Economic Development Committee passed HB 152, this year's AT&T Bill.  The bill is now in House Rules Committee, which could recommit the bill or send it to the floor for a vote.  Access to reliable landline phone service for thousands of Kentuckians hangs in the balance.

PLEASE CALL AGAIN TO 1-800-372-7181 AND LEAVE A MESSAGE FOR ALL STATE REPRESENTATIVES AND SENATORS TO REJECT HB 152 AND SB 3 AND TO PROTECT KENTUCKY'S CONSUMERS WHO DEPEND ON RELIABLE LANDLINE PHONE SERVICE.  ALSO, PLEASE EMAIL YOUR STATE REPRESENTATIVE AND ASK THEM TO OPPOSE HB 152.

“AT&T” BILL WOULD OPEN DOOR TO LESS FUNCTIONAL, LESS RELIABLE PHONE SERVICE FOR KENTUCKIANS[1]

     AT&T is pushing for passage of HB 152 and SB 3, which would eliminate the right to stand-alone basic local phone service in Bowling Green, Georgetown, Henderson, Hopkinsville, Frankfort, Louisville, Owensboro, Paducah, Richmond, Boone County, Independence, Elizabethtown, Lexington, Nicholasville, and London, and would allow AT&T, Windstream and Cincinnati Bell to offer more expensive “bundled” services, and less functional IP-enabled voice service instead of reliable, less expensive stand-alone, basic local phone service.

     Outside of these urban areas, customers who move could lose the right to basic stand-alone service unless the new home or apartment has a landline installed by the current carrier , and wireless services that are less functional could replace reliable, independently powered landline service for new home and businesses built after the bill becomes law.

     The challenge facing the Commonwealth and the nation is how to assure the protection of consumers as the nation transitions from the “legacy” circuit switched phone network that has functioned with near-perfect reliability for some 125 years, to digital, packet-switched Internet Protocol (IP) communications.  HB 152 and SB 3 lack the protections needed to assure that the most vulnerable customers – low and fixed-income households and those with medical conditions requiring remote monitoring – are protected, and that the services we now use through our phone lines – burglary and fire alarms, and fax machines – continue to work where IP-enabled communications replace circuit-switched voice service.

The General Assembly should wait until the FCC finalizes the rules for the transition to digital communications

On November 21, 2014, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted a “Declaratory Ruling” clarifying when a carrier like AT&T must seek FCC approval to discontinue a service. The FCC ruling clarified that “discontinuance” of a service is viewed in functional terms of the practical impact of its actions on the consumer and the uses that the consumer makes of the phone service.

In testimony before a House Committee on February 5, 2015, an AT&T representative referred to that FCC Ruling, testifying that “[t]he FCC recently made clear that AT&T cannot stop offering legacy voice service in urban or rural areas of Kentucky without the FCC’s permission.  So as a practical matter, AT&T must continue providing legacy voice service throughout its Kentucky service areas until the FCC is satisfied that appropriate replacement services are available.”

What AT&T neglected to mention is that U.S. Telecom, the trade association to which it belongs, has asked the FCC to reconsider that ruling, arguing that the phone companies like AT&T do not need to assure that the IP-enabled wired or wireless voice services they offer will support third-party medical, fire, or burglar alarm or fax services, and that they should not have to seek FCC approval to replace legacy voice services with new services that don’t support these functions. A reading of the terms of service agreements available on the AT&T website for both the wired and wireless IP-enabled AT&T services reflects that they disclaim the equivalency of their IP-enabled services with wireline legacy services in terms of reliability, and ability to support alarms, monitoring, and fax usage.

     The FCC also opened a rulemaking on November 21, 2014 inviting comment on the rules that will be needed to protect consumers during this transition from the legacy network to IP-enabled communications.  Among the issues the FCC is seeking comment on are protecting consumers’ ability to call 911 during power outages, since unlike the current wireline network, IP-enabled wired and wireless services aren’t independently powered and have limited battery power.  Assuring accurate 911 location capability is another issue, since wireless services don’t warrant that if you call 911, your location can be determined. Finally, the FCC rule seeks greater consumer protection and a process to assure that new services meet needs of consumers before the traditional networks are retired.

     Kentucky should not weaken or eliminate current consumer protections under state law, unless and until we are certain that these protections will be afforded under federal law.

Kentucky’s Telecom Laws Have Not Impeded AT&T Investment, And Eliminating Basic-Local Stand-Alone Phone Service Won’t Guarantee Any New Investment

     AT&T testified in committee that if the General Assembly waits, Kentucky will lose new investment because our laws aren’t “modernized.”  AT&T suggested that investment is bypassing Kentucky because our laws are outdated and not business-friendly.

    Yet:

•  In June 2010, AT&T praised Kentucky leaders for creating “an environment that encourages companies to invest aggressively in Kentucky.” 

• In June 2011, AT&T announced that it had invested more than $525 million in Kentucky “over the past three years” and that “the company will continue to invest aggressively in” Kentucky as part of a $19-billion nationwide investment announced in 2011. 

• In March 2012, AT&T said that “thanks to the vision and business-friendly approach of the General Assembly, Kentucky has a strong regulatory environment for telecom infrastructure investment.” 

      AT&T invested more than $95 billion nationwide during 2007-2011 and $20 billion in 2011 alone. The $1.1 billion invested by AT&T in Kentucky from 2007 – 2011, which AT&T called “aggressive,” amounted to 1.1% of the total national AT&T capital investment over that period.  The announced 2013-2015 investment for Kentucky will continue that same investment trend as a percentage of national investment, and could be marginally higher or lower.  Current investment is still on the same pace of $200 million per year that it has been for several years.

     Eliminating the right to stand-alone, reliable, local exchange phone service does not appear likely to materially change AT&T investment in their wireless and wirelines networks in Kentucky, and certainly was no bar to “aggressive investment” in telecom infrastructure in recent years.  Nothing in HB 152 or SB 3 assures that AT&T will invest one cent more than it has planned to spend, nor will the bills do anything to advance broadband access for rural Kentuckians.

 

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[1] This article was authored by Tom FitzGerald, Director, Kentucky Resources Council, Inc., www.kyrc.org

Flush Your Cell Phone. Do It Now.

Digby asks What if Big Brother is Your Crazy Brother-in-Law?

Everyone says the good news about the NSA spying is that they assure us that they have no interest in using all the information they're filing away about Americans. Unless we are a terrorist or know someone who is a terrorist or know someone who knows someone who might be a terrorist, (or might accidentally be overheard committing what someone might think is a crime) we have nothing to fear from all this surveillance.

Well, maybe not from the NSA, at least not this afternoon.  But they aren't the only game in town:

The National Security Agency isn't the only government entity secretly collecting data from people's cellphones. Local police are increasingly scooping it up, too. Armed with new technologies, including mobile devices that tap into cellphone data in real time, dozens of local and state police agencies are capturing information about thousands of cellphone users at a time, whether they are targets of an investigation or not, according to public records obtained by USA TODAY and Gannett newspapers and TV stations. 

The records, from more than 125 police agencies in 33 states, reveal: About one in four law-enforcement agencies have used a tactic known as a "tower dump," which gives police data about the identity, activity and location of any phone that connects to the targeted cellphone towers over a set span of time, usually an hour or two. A typical dump covers multiple towers, and wireless providers, and can net information from thousands of phones.

In most states, police can get many kinds of cellphone data without obtaining awarrant, which they'd need to search someone's house or car. Privacy advocates, legislators and courts are debating the legal standards with increasing intensity as technology — and the amount of sensitive information people entrust to their devices — evolves.

Many people aren't aware that a smartphone is an adept location-tracking device. It's constantly sending signals to nearby cell towers, even when it's not being used. And wireless carriers store data about your device, from where it's been to whom you've called and texted, some of it for years.

The power for police is alluring: a vast data net that can be a cutting-edge crime-fighting tool. 

SNIP

And they're collecting boatloads of it:

Law-enforcement records show police can use initial data from a tower dump to ask for another court order for more information, including addresses, billing records and logs of calls, texts and locations. 

Cellphone data sweeps fit into a broadening effort by police to collect and mine information about people's activities and movements. 

Police can harvest data about motorists by mining toll-road payments, red-light cameras and license-plate readers. Cities are installing cameras in public areas, some with facial-recognition capabilities, as well as Wi-Fi networks that can record the location and other details about any connecting device.

It is, unsurprisingly, being misused by local yahoos for their own purposes:

Some examples of documented misuse of cellphone data-gathering technology: 

In Minnesota: State auditors found that 88 police officers in departments across the state misused their access to personal data in the state driver's license database to look up information on family, friends, girlfriends or others without proper authorization or relevance to any official investigation in 2012. And those were just the clear-cut cases. Auditors said that more than half of the law enforcement officers in the state made questionable queries of the database, which includes photos and an array of sensitive personal data.  

SNIP

It isn't just Big Brother who's watching our every move. It's our crazy brother-in-law too. Just casually accepting this seems like a bad idea to me.

All that information is from a major USA Today and Gannet investigation that everyone should read. I get that  most people don't see this as any big deal --- they've seen it used on Law and order and it caught "the bad guy."  But in real life this adds up to the police having access to a whole lot of personal information without any probable cause or a warrant and that adds up to way more power in the hands of police.  And they already have too much.

Poor or Elderly in Kentucky? No Phone Service for You!

By @KYYellowDog

The lie here is that broadband internet is generally available in Kentucky outside of metropolitan areas. It is not. I myself live fewer than 10 miles from a city with cable broadband, and yet I do NOT have access to cable, wireless or satellite internet. On various "coverage maps" by phone and wireless providers, my neighborhood is listed as having "good coverage." THIS IS A LIE. Without my telephone landline, I have neither internet nor basic phone service. Without a landline, I cannot even call 9-11 in case of a fire, crime or medical emergency.

Zandar nails it:

When you privatize a utility and cry "Government has no business in business!" and leave everything up to the free market and profit motive, you invariably get people who are priced out of the market. Take for example phone companies who want to simply end landline phone service in the some of the poorest counties in the country in eastern Kentucky.

The industry is pushing Senate Bill 135, referred to as "the AT&T bill" by its sponsor and others because it originated with that company's lobbyists. The bill would strip the Kentucky Public Service Commission of most of its remaining oversight of basic phone service provided by the three major carriers — AT&T, Windstream and Cincinnati Bell — such as the power to initiate investigations into service problems.

More significant, critics say, the bill would let the companies end basic phone service in less profitable parts of their territories if other communications options. State law now requires the companies to serve as "carriers of last resort" for households throughout their territories.

AT&T says it must follow where the market leads. Among its customers, land line usage has dropped 50 percent over the last 10 years and wireless usage has jumped 300 percent, said AT&T spokesman Brad Rateike.

When you take utilities out of the public domain, this is invariably what happens. Profit motive means providing the utility to areas where it's unprofitable means the service is ended. That's where we're heading right now, and with the country needing tens of billions of dollars worth of utility and infrastructure improvements, putting those under the aegis of the free market will only make things worse.

Taxes exist precisely for things like this. But we're told government itself is evil and useless. I may joke about how glibertarians want us all to fend for ourselves, but the reality is that's exactly where we're going under "smaller government".

One of the huge obstacles to progressive legislation in Kentucky is the overwhelming majority in the General Assembly of representatives from rural counties. The annual battle is not so much Democrats vs. repugs as it is urban liberals versus rural mouthbreathing dumbfucks.

The only thing that can unite them is massive amounts of corporate campaign cash. I predict AT&T wins this one.

Civil Rights for People; Economic and Privacy Rights Only for Corporations

The Court of Appeals decision overturning the odious, hate-ridden and let us never forget freakazoid-driven Proposition 8 declaring LGBT Americans to be subhuman is deeply satisfying for many reasons.

But my favorite reason today is because it led to this declaration by Conservative Icon and Victorious Defender of Marriage Equality Ted Olson, ladies and gentleman, who is obviously neither republican nor conservative, no matter what he claims.

Marriage is a conservative value, not conservatives own it or liberals own it -- but the loving relationship between individuals that want to be respected by their society and treated as equals is a conservative value. It involves liberty and privacy and association and identity. Marriage is a building block of our society. Young people get it. Older people are still getting it.

But all of the polls are changing. People more and more are understanding that these are our American citizens, these are our brothers and our sisters, and we have got to treat them right, we have got to treat them decently, and we have got to give them the same freedom and justice that we give to other people. More and more people in America are understanding that. I`m pleased to say more and more Republicans are understanding that.

I`m sad to say -- it makes me sad to say that Republicans haven`t fully understood it. But I think the day will come, and every time that we have a chance, David Boies and I have a chance to address this question, we believe we`re converting more people and persuading more people that this is the right thing.

It not a conservative or liberal issue, or Republican or Democrats, when David Boies and I came together on this, our mission was to persuade the American people that this is an issue of American justice, American freedom, American equality. These are the principles all men are created equal in this country. We have got to get there.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

And if anyone tries to dismiss this victory by claiming it doesn't count because the Ninth Circuit is oh-so-fucking-liberal, this case from December proves that the Ninth Circuit is not by any stretch of the imagination liberal. David Dayen at Firedoglake:

A federal court has upheld on appeal a ruling that telecom companies can receive legal immunity from Congress for participating in the warrantless wiretapping program under George W. Bush.

A U.S. appeals panel ... upheld the constitutionality of a federal law that grants immunity to telecommunications companies that assist the U.S. government in conducting surveillance of American citizens.

Several lawsuits filed in the wake of revelations about warrantless wiretapping alleged that telecom companies provided authorities with direct access to nearly all communications passing through their domestic facilities.

Defendants included AT&T, Sprint Nextel and Verizon Communications Inc.

This came out of a three-judge panel on the liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. They protected the telecoms from claims, not the government, so there’s theoretically an avenue to go after the constitutionality of the immunity law that wat. But the government has consistently frustrated lawsuits to that end by declaring everything protected under the state secrets privilege, and courts have generally given wide latitude on those declarations.

However, the Ninth Circuit did allow one case to advance today, ignoring the secrecy claims:

In a separate ruling, the 9th Circuit on Thursday allowed a separate case against the government to proceed, in which plaintiffs allege a communications dragnet of ordinary citizens.

That lawsuit claims the National Security Agency diverted Internet traffic into secure rooms in AT&T facilities across the country. The proposed class action alleges “an unprecedented suspicionless general search” throughout the communications network.

The 9th Circuit reversed a lower court and ruled that the plaintiffs have legal standing to pursue the case.

I’ll wait for bmaz’ analysis, but this could actually get us somewhere on the broader constitutional questions over wiretapping without a warrant. On the subject of the telecoms getting off scot-free, however, we appear to have reached a dead end.

UPDATE: And right on cue, here’s the scoop from Emptywheel. The summation:

In short, the 9th Circuit just said to the government that it could have one–telecom immunity–or another–immunity from citizens’ efforts for redress for illegal surveillance, but it can’t have both. The Executive doesn’t get to pick and choose when it wants to bow to the authority of Congress’ Article I powers.

And with these two decisions by the same Court of Appeals we take another giant step into Separate and Unequal Justice: civil rights (but not civil liberties) for people, but economic and privacy rights only for corporations.