Tim Karr

Hi, everyone. How's everybody doing? Day 3 of Netroots Nation. As you may have seen on the postcards that were handed around, this is the panel on Big Telco, Threat to Democracy. And you could probably do a panel on Big Energy, you can probably do a panel on Big Pharma, and you'd have a lot of the same issues. But since we're people who deal with communications – most of the people here are bloggers – I think this has a special relevance for us.

But I just wanted to start by asking a couple questions of people here. Well, we can do a show of hands, or more appropriately, a show of boos. I'm going to ask a couple questions and you can tell me by booing. And you'll understand why when you hear the question. How many people here are customers of AT&T? [Boos.] Verizon? [Boos.] Quest Communications? [Boos.] Comcast? [Louder boos.] Time Warner? [Boos.] Cable Vision? Well, the list goes on. And it's actually not a very big list.

But the point is that all of us contribute to this problem in some way, and it's not really our fault. The problem is that the marketplace is so limited that in the United States, if you're using a broadband connection, 98% of those connections to the home are controlled either by the phone or cable duopoly. And that translates into hundreds of billions of dollars of profits for these companies, which in itself translates into the type of contributions that you see in Washington that go to the core of a lot of the problems we're dealing with, that in fact are the source of the problem.

We have, in AT&T, one of the biggest political contributors to campaigns. But it doesn't end there. These companies spend money on lobbyists, they spend money on Astro Turf groups, they spend money on junkets, and all sorts of ways that corrupt our democracy in a lot of the ways the Professor Lawrence Lessig spoke about earlier today.

And so that's the bad news. But the good news is that you have in front you here a group of people that are doing a lot of work to try to turn that around. And we're groups that use different tactics and we approach this problem in different ways, but we do all recognize that this is a fundamental problem in our democracy.

And again, my name is Tim Karr. I'm with Free Press. I also run the SaveTheInternet. com coalition with a number of other groups, but we address it in one way. And I'll be the moderator today. And to start off, I just wanted to give each of our panelists about five to seven minutes to present this issue and why they think it's important, why they think this problem is important. Then we're going to ask a couple of questions and I want to open it to the crowd to get you to participate as well. And obviously we welcome your questions.

First, just to illustrate this problem… And when we say “Big Telco,” in my mind it includes not just the phone companies, but also the cable companies, because essentially they're doing the same thing. The cable companies are getting into the realm of tele-phony. Phone companies are dealing with the Internet and increasingly with television services. And it really is the companies that, in time, will be our portal to all things media, and that's why this discussion is particularly critical today.

But I just wanted to start it off by showing you a video. Unfortunately, we did have a bit of a tech issue in that the audio didn't work, so I'm actually going to narrate this video for you in real-time. Just to give you a little bit of context, Free Press has been working recently in fighting Comcast, a battle that's taking place at the FCC. But it really deals with what Comcast has been doing for some time now, which is blocking people's ability to use file-sharing applications like BitTorrent. And it had been something that had been percolating amongst people who share files, rich media files, in the blogosphere for a while.

And it wasn't until one guy decided to look into it and found, indeed, that this company was blocking our ability to do certain things on the Web that we got involved in this process and we filed a complaint at the FCC and we created this political process, this governing process around this issue, to try to figure out what Comcast was doing and to make sure that our regulators, people in Washington, were in place to do something about it. So part of this process was the convening of public hearings that the FCC had done to take care of this. Again, the audio is not working. Well, it is a little bit. Hear that? It's very faint.

Anyway, so this is a hearing that they held in Boston, and Free Press was doing a lot of organizing to turn people out for this hearing because we wanted the FCC, these regula-tors from Washington, to come and really hear public input about the Internet. So what Comcast did, upon hearing about this, they got scared and they started hiring people off the street. They actually plucked people off the street who didn't care about this issue, didn't know about this issue, and they filled seats there. They showed up two hours before the event and they filled all the seats, and when real Bostonians came who were concerned about this issue, they were barred entry. The fire marshal was at the door and said the venue was full.

So effectively what Comcast was doing was, they're not only blocking our access to the Internet, but they were blocking access to this very public forum. And this was in February of this year. So unfortunately you can't hear the video, but that's really what's going on here, and it just talks about this sort of fundamental disconnect that a lot of these companies have when it comes to addressing these basic threats to our democracy.

So I'm going to stop talking now and sort of shift over to a role as moderator. But I wanted to start with Nancy Keenan, who is with NARAL Pro-Choice America, who has a very interesting story to tell – and their experience was last year – in trying to use Verizon's text messaging services. So Nancy, do you want to start?

Nancy Keenan

Great. Yeah, thanks, Tim. And thank you all for joining us, and thanks to my colleagues here on the panel. It's really an honor for me to be with Michael and Cindy, and of course, Matt. And for many of you that have been working on this issue for a long time, NARAL Pro-Choice America is a reproductive rights organization. We don't necessarily do tele-communications. But basically we entered this in what happened to us with our experi-
ience, and so I'm here just to tell you the story. And I think that the story then sets up how it's made tangible, if you will, to people in this country, the importance of net neutrality.

So let me start with a warning. This is a controversial and unsavory story. Now, those words are going to mean something to you a little bit further on. But we wake up every day doing reproductive rights at NARAL Pro-Choice America, and in '07, as Tim said, we were planning to launch a text messaging program to expand the way we communicate with our activists and our members across the country in the political process.

So you guys all know that one of the major steps in implementing a text messaging is that you have to have short code. So we had applied for our short code, and every major carrier in the country accepted our application for that short code except for one. Can you hear me now? [Laughter.]

Well, we inquired why Verizon was holding up our short code process, and Mobile Commons, who was our vendor in this, had never experienced that; they had never experienced where a vendor denied somebody the short code. So they told us they would not accept the program of any group that, and I quote, "seeks to promote an agenda or distribute content that (in their discretion) may be seen as controversial or unsavory to any of our users," end quote.

Well, that kind of ticked me off, so we first of all talked to them about. But the people who are getting our messages signed up to get our messages; we're not spamming folks here. This was a way that they were actually signing up to get messages from us. And some of you might think, well, then why bother? Let Verizon go, do what you guys have to do, get your short code, keep moving. Well, the fact of the matter is Verizon has 25% of the cell phone market. So for us, if our short code didn't work on Verizon customer phones, then our program really was somewhat hindered with the numbers of members that we had across the country that access their network.

So we had a lot of back and forth, a lot of discussions internally about lawyers: Did we need lawyers to call and tell Verizon that we were not unsavory? But we came to the conclusion that, well, no, that wasn't going to work, so I actually wrote a letter to the CEO of Verizon Wireless asking them to reconsider their policy. At the same time, the New York Times got wind of this. So on the evening of September 26th, the New York Times posted a story about Verizon rejecting our short code application. It was on the front page of the print edition the next day. Here's the kicker: in that story, Verizon defended its position.

Well, hell to no – I mean, given their response, we did what we do best, and that was mobilizing our members and our activists to take action. So we launched an alert to our members asking them to call Verizon to reverse the decision, and there were about 20,000 messages reached Verizon in two hours. So it was unbelievable, the response across this country on this issue. It was, again, tangible, a tangible example of corporations kind of interfering in messages.

Our Web site traffic increased by 213%, and at least by our estimation there were about 187 separate blog posts that day, and we experienced a 62% increase in subscriptions to our text messaging program. So people, they heard it; they heard it. And so by eleven o’clock on that day the story hit, the Verizon CEO sent us a letter saying that they had reversed their decision. [Applause.]

Now, the credit goes to all of you – to the members and activists that we work with, to many people sitting at this table and their organizations, because the fact was, it wouldn't have happened if it had not been for that action by a lot of groups and a lot of organiza-tions to make it happen. So you guys are involved in the ongoing debate. They're going to talk about that. I'm not going to take much more time.

But one last thing I think that is important is that NARAL Pro-Choice America continues to encourage that debate in the sense that we wrote an op-ed to the Washington Post. Hold onto your seats. It was myself, as President of NARAL, and the President of the Christian Coalition, and we did an op-ed encouraging Congress and the FCC to continue to take a look at this issue and the importance of preserving Americans' abilities to participate in the political process. So even though we won this fight short-term, long-term the fight goes on. And I think that's what these folks are going to talk about: that no corporation should have the ability to censor. And again, the fight goes on, and hopefully you will continue to join us in that. So thank you very much. [Applause.]

Tim Karr

Thanks, Nancy. Just a quick question: Had you ever done anything of that sort with the Christian Coalition in America before, or was this the first time you've actually collabor-ated?

Nancy Keenan

That was the first time I had collaborated with The Christian Coalition, but again, it was about the issue of censorship in this country. And we might be differing on the issue, but by god, it was bigger than both of us.

Tim Karr

Great. All right, next we're going to move on to Cindy Cohn, who's with EFF, and has been doing a lot of work, obviously, on an issue that's been talked about a lot at this conference around the FISA legislation which was passed recently, and around the issue of privacy over the Internet and privacy over our phone lines. Cindy?

Cindy Cohn

Thank you. By the way, EFF's techs did the research that helped confirm the Comcast blocking BitTorrent, and one of the side effects of that is we realized how hard it is to figure out what the hell your ISP is doing with your traffic. And so we are, jointly with a lot of other folks right now, creating a computer program that's at the moment called Switzerland, but I think the name may change, that's going to help give you the tools to better figure out what's going on with your packets and to better distinguish between the kind of noxious behavior that we're talking about, the censorship and the kind of ordinary sometimes-the-Internet-doesn't work-so-well kinds of behavior, so watch for that from EFF.

But I'm here to talk about a different threat to democracy, one that has engulfed my organization and a lot of you for the last couple of years, and that is the blatant illegal behavior by major telecommunications agencies in spying on you all. And I wanted to start with a shout-out to the blogs. We, I think, unless you've been under a rock for the last couple of months, know that we just emerged from a tremendous fight in the U.S. Congress to try to save the lawsuit that my organization brought and the forty others that we lead arising from this illegal behavior.

And honestly, we're overwhelmed with the support that we got from this community. I just want to thank you all so much and let you know that the 25 people in the tiny office in the Mission District of San Francisco think the world of you. And a special shout-out to Glenn Greenwald and Firedoglake. And I know hundreds and probably thousands of others of you out there who stood up and said this is wrong and we have to stop it. And even though we didn't win this time – and I'll talk about how the fight's going to go on – we really appreciate the standing up that you all did on this issue.

So what's going on? Well, I just wanted to make sure, because in a lot of the sturm und drang, I think people might have missed what it is that we're fighting about. So my organization brought a national class action on behalf of all of AT&T customers based upon this. You can download the entire one-pager that will describe it, but I wanted you to see the diagram of the key evidence that we have in our case. This is a setup that's happening at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco, in Nancy Pelosi's district. Excuse me, I'm still working on my anger issues about this. [Laughter.]

What has been installed at 611 Folsom Street is what's called a splitter, for techs. And what this does is, all of the messages – you can see the millions of communications from ordinary AT&T customers on the top – they flow through this station at 611 Folsom Street, a chunk of them do. The way the Internet works, it's kind of hard to predict which ones flow through, but AT&T customer messages and messages to and from AT&T customers go through this place at 611 Folsom Street. And what happens inside this building is that a copy of every single one of these messages gets made and sent to an NSA-controlled room in that building, Room 641-A.

Now, how do I know this? Well, I have the diagrams of it. I have pictures of the room, and I have a whistleblower who helped manage this structure, so I've got what's called direct evidence, in the law, of this exact structure. And indeed, AT&T has confirmed it. AT&T has confirmed that the information that our whistleblower brought to us about this surveillance structure is their proprietary information. They did it in the context of trying to make us get it back to them. But you can't ask the court to give you back something that's fraudulent. As part of having to say we want it back, they had to say it was true and it was their proprietary information. So this isn't really in dispute.

And what does this do? This means that all of your Internet activities, and the chunk of your phone activities – it's kind of a complicated tech thing, if you really want to know – but a chunk of your phone activities are being copied wholesale and given to the NSA by AT&T in a facility at 611 Folsom Street. So that's what the lawsuit is about. And the reason that the lawsuit is about that is because that's illegal. The phone companies have a duty to protect your privacy. It's written in law. And frankly, it's written in the Constitu-tion. It's part of the Fourth Amendment. They can't be the agent of the government for purposes of doing illegal seizure of your communications.

So this is what the lawsuit is about. And there are a couple of points I want to make about this in my couple of minutes that seem to have been lost in a bit of the discussion, but I want to make sure that this community knows it. The first is, this is all communications. This isn't people talking to al-Qaeda, this isn't just international communications, and this isn't foreign-to-foreign communications that happen to be routed through the United States. This is everything. A splitter is a dumb copying machine. It copies everything. There is no targeting whatsoever before this information goes to the NSA.

The second thing is that this is in San Francisco, and that means that this is a domestic program. Because there are places in this country – there's actually a cool map of this that you can find on the Internet – where international traffic comes into the United States, where the cables come up from the sea, where the satellites come down from the sky. None of them are in San Francisco. In fact, San Francisco is three or four hops up domestically on the Internet from any international point.

So this isn't aimed at international traffic, and this isn't aimed at foreign traffic. This is aimed at you; this is aimed at me. This is a domestic program. And I think it's time we start talking about it as if it was a domestic program and about the surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans rather than about whether you're talking to al-Qaeda or foreign-to-foreign traffic routing because the evidence just isn't consistent with that kind of story-telling that we've seen in Congress.

So, again, unless you've been under a rock, you know that the law has passed. And so I wanted to let you know what EFF is planning to do moving forward, along with a lot of our colleagues. And we've really got a three-pronged attack that we're going for. The first is, we think the law is unconstitutional. It's a violation of the due process rights of all of you who said boo when you said you are AT&T customers. There are companion cases for Verizon and Sprint and several other carriers as well. Our case is the AT&T case and we're co-lead for all of them. But I talk about AT&T because this is the evidence that we have at EFF.

So we think the law is unconstitutional. It's unconstitutional for the President to get to give a piece of paper to the courts and get a regular lawsuit dismissed. It's a violation of separation of powers. The President doesn't decide what the law is; the courts do. So we're going to be fighting this in the courts. We're going to be working in Congress to repeal it. We already have pledges from several members of Congress, and I think to the extent that you're talking to the Netroots candidates about here, you should ask them if they'll help to repeal the law when they get here. I know some have already told me privately they would, but I'd like to see some public statements about that.

And we're going to be launching a new case within the next couple of weeks against the government, because if it was illegal for AT&T to hand this information to the govern-ment, it was illegal for the government to receive it. And we're going to launch that litigation in the next couple of weeks. It's going to be in the Northern District of Califor-nia federal court. The same judge who thought we had a case the first time will be hearing this, at least initially, and we're going to go forward with that. There are reasons we picked AT&T in the first instance and not the government, but if Congress says you've got to sue the government, well, we'll go that way as well.

So the question that I was asked on this was to see if I could figure out why T&T did this; why would they have done this. And I have to say I don't really have the answer to it. I'll say that there are a few things that we do. We do know that the head of Quest came forward and said that he was asked to install a tracking facility for phone records – there's also surveillance of your phone records as well that we have evidence of – and he said no.

And what he said happened after that was that he stopped getting government contracts – in fact, a key government contract that he thought he was on the edge of signing he didn't get as a result of this. So that's one theory. The theory is that at this point, the telecom-munications companies' main customers in a lot of areas are the government, and if they lose that customer, they lose a lot of money, so they play ball.

The other one is that Congress passed a law a few years ago called CALEA, and extra points and an EFF sticker for anybody who knows what that acronym is. CALEA requires the phone companies to build their infrastructure in a way to facilitate surveil-lance, ordinary legal surveillance, not the illegal surveillance we're talking about here. But what CALEA did was it set up an in-bed relationship between the major phone companies and the government, where the government is dictating how their systems work in order to facilitate surveillance. And I think there's a story to be told about how that relationship may have led to this sort of behavior.

The third thing I'll note is that AT&T, at the time that this was installed, was actually in pretty significant financial trouble. If you've been watching the mergers, you'll know that AT&T – what we call AT&T today is actually not what AT&T was before – the bigger company, the Texas company, bought them and then took their name.

In 2003, when this was installed, AT&T was actually under some pretty hard times. And we think that there may have been some financial incentives or some other things that the government gave them in order to facilitate this kind of infrastructure. By the way, I talked about 611 Folsom Street, but we have evidence of at least seven other such facilities all across the country, also in places nowhere near the border, like Atlanta, so we do believe this is a national program.

So I've used probably more than my seven minutes, but I wanted to tell you a little bit of my story and to tell you that we're going to continue to fight this at EFF, and we'd like to have your help. I also want to make one other pitch, since we have so many bloggers in the audience, and you're close to our hearts at EFF.

We have a bloggers' rights project at EFF, and we have a pretty comprehensive bloggers' legal guide on our Web site that you might want to take a look at. And certainly if you all get into any trouble, please give us a call. We are known as the 911 of the Internet, and for good reason, and we're happy to try to help folks who get into trouble, whether it's with copyright laws or with your ISP or with the government. Please give us a call, and if we can't help you, we can probably help you try to find somebody who can. Thanks. [Applause.]

Tim Karr

Thanks a lot, Cindy. That was really helpful. Next we have Michael Kieschnick, who's with CREDO Mobile. You may know of CREDO as Working Assets, and they've changed their name recently, in the last couple of months, I believe. Michael?

Michael Kieschnick

I'm going to start with a fun slide. So just look at that one for a minute. [Laughter.] Okay, enough of that. So I want to pick up the story. There's always been bad guys, right? And law enforcement has always wanted to sort of use telecom to find them and track them. That's always been true. It's always been the case also that politicians like to use the same technology to go after their enemies and their competitors, so I think that has to be seen as part of this story.

It's always been true there's a tension between two models of enterprise and journalism, one the common carrier model. When you pick up your phone, the telephone company doesn't tell you who you can talk to or what you can say; and the other is sort of the newspaper model where you have to own the press in order to determine what you say. There's been tension for centuries of these two, and the only way that they ever get resolved in the public interest is when people like us fight back. Otherwise the forces are very strong that you get wiretapped and there's censorship. Now, we're in a moment where the forces that like to wiretap and to censor are winning, and they're really winning big time. So that's what this fight is about.

Cindy talked about how AT&T is not really AT&T, and I'm going to come back to this, but a few of you are old enough to remember when AT&T pretty much did everything and then got broken up by the government. It's sort of unimaginable that that could happen today. So it's just worth briefly remembering all the companies that now make up AT&T – Pacific Bell, my local company; Southern New England Telephone, which is mainly Connecticut; Ameritech, which is all of the Midwest; Bell South, and of course they have Cingular. And at the heart of it is SPC. I tend to think of the new AT&T as like a shark. They bought all these; they bought them fairly cheaply. And for those of you who are Star Trek fans, they're a little bit like the Borg.

So now I'd like to take up Cindy's question just a little bit more. So, why? The first thing to know about the telecoms is they've been regulated forever. They're used to being regulated. Frankly, they like being regulated. They have been comfortable buying politicians, usually state politicians, for decades. They know how to do it. And if you've ever tried to go up against your public utilities commission, that's often very hard. There are a few states where that isn't true, but often that is the case. The second reason is that they tend to hire, as CEOs, people who know how to deal with the public sector. The CEO of Verizon used to work for the Carter Administration. This is not wholly a nonpartisan issue, but that's who they tend to hire.

The third thing that Cindy referred to, which I think is very important, is that there are billions of dollars of contracts here. There's spectrum that gets bought and sold. So the government is sort of life or death, and if you're a telecom company, you want certainty. The story about Qwest and Nacchio, it's a complicated story. I have no doubt that what they said is true, and that guy lost a criminal case as well. So it's potentially much more vicious than just, oh, they didn't get the contract. He was prosecuted. So the Borg may not be a bad example.

And the last thing that I'd want to say is that, again, at the heart of AT&T is SPC. Now, I can say what I'm about to say because I'm from Texas. I grew up here; I grew up in Dallas. This is sort of hard right-wing territory. So SPC, therefore AT&T is, at its heart, a Texas company. And there is a strain of sort of monopoly authoritarianism that runs deep in sort of Republican circles in Texas. This is not a random thing. And so anyone who thinks it's just business is only half right. This is Texas business, and Texas business is now the biggest part of the Internet and telecoms, and we would really be mistaken if we neglected that.

So let's look a little bit more at AT&T. If you have AT&T, they buy politicians, they spend tens of millions lobbying for retroactive immunity, they spend tens of millions fighting against net neutrality. This is your money. Here's some of what they have paid for. This a nonpartisan or maybe a bipartisan slide. John McCain got a lot. AT&T was one of his earliest contributors to his exploratory committee for President.

They've been a big supporter of George Bush and of course Steny Hoyer, and more recently Jay Rockefeller. Jay Rockefeller, of course, is the Senator who pushed through retroactive immunity. And I have to say, what a cheap sale that was. I mean, that is really a good deal. I think it's also important to know that AT&T was an early supporter of Bush-Cheney, both elections.

So if you add up the numbers, in 2007 it was $16 million in lobbying. Only $5 million so far this year, but we don't have the latest reports; it'll probably be 20. So let's see how big the numbers are. They are the biggest political contributor to candidates if you go back to 1989, The biggest. Again, cheap at the price. This is really easy. Matt Stoller, $700. [Laughter.]

Matt Stoller

So wait, is that buying me, or what is that?

Michael Kieschnick

I think that's a question for the audience.

Matt Stoller

Oh.

Michael Kieschnick

So the cartoonists have finally picked this up. I think this one came out during the fight. This one came out after the fight. So this is deadly serious stuff. It's good to have fun with it. Matt, dollar for dollar, is the best bargain fighting all this. That's my view. At $700, I think that we all need to chip in for a few more ads on Open Left. We get a lot of social change from that.

Matt Stoller

I like this panel.

Michael Kieschnick

So what should you do? Most of the American population has no idea. They don't know about that splitter, and they need to know because it's still there. They don't know that the politicians are bought. And we shouldn't pretend for a second that if Obama wins this, all goes away. This keeps going. This totally keeps going.

So each of us in our various roles, whether we're bloggers, whether or not we're non-blogger activists, whether or not we're donors, whether or not we're just phone company customers, we all have a role to play. We're way behind in this fight. We have a good platform, but we have a long way to go. Thank you very much. [Applause.]

Tim Karr

Thanks, Michael. It's interesting that each of our organizations represents a different approach to this issue. We work together in some respects and we work on our own issues in other ways. But it's important that we have up here also someone who really represents the blogging community, and Matt has been a leading voice on this issue.

And it's not only his ability to organize the Netroots, but his depth of knowledge on this issue has really led the way, and I think that allowed for a lot of other bloggers who may think this issue is too wonky, too technical, what have you, to enter into it in a meaningful way. And I just want to give a shout-out to Matt for that, but also give you a chance to tell us a little about this work and your piece of it.

Matt Stoller

Thank you so much. I have a couple of points to make on the question of whether this is random – not the new CEO of AT&T, but the old CEO who just retired. The way he relaxed is, he went home to his ranch in Texas and cleared brush. I'm not making that up. Like, that's creepy, right? It's not random.

Another point: What Nancy didn't say is that the head of public policy for Verizon is a guy named Tom Tauke. And Tom Tauke ran against Tom Harkin for the Senate in Nineteen...I think it was in '92. And he was defeated by Harkin, and one of the key advo-cacy groups that was working against him was actually NARAL. So I'm not drawing a one-to-one correlation here. I'll do the Larry Lessig thing and say that maybe they genuinely thought the message was unsavory or controversial, but certainly that kind of political relationship to censorship makes the decision-making untrustworthy, and shows that companies shouldn't have the power to censor.

I want to recognize Adam Green, who's in the room. He's been a key part of the net neutrality fight, so I just want to... [Applause.]

Cindy Cohn

And the FISA fight. MoveOn's been great, and Adam's been.

Matt Stoller

And they are the same fight. And I will go into that. But I want to talk about this as a threat to democracy. A friend of mine has a copy of the Bill of Rights, but it's written on metal. And the reason it's written on metal is because he keeps it in his pocket and when he goes through metal detectors, the metal detector goes off, and he says, "Oh, that must be my Bill of Rights." [Laughter.]

And one of the things that's happening – and all of you, I assume, came here via the airport and we all went through these elaborate security procedures which we all know don't make us safer. But what's happening is the public is getting used to obeying what people in uniform tell us to do sort of just as a matter of course. And that is core to the surveillance state, to the work that the telecoms are doing, and to the people that we are becoming.

I had this idea for an ad that I want to see running for Republicans, which is Republican members that voted for the FISA debacle, and the ad is, "Your member voted to allow President Barack Obama to read your email" as a way of showing just what a threat this is to our liberties. But one thing you'll notice about coalitions in Congress – and I sort of observe some of those in my blog – is that the coalitions that are largely anti-choice, that are pro-war, pro-bankruptcy bill and pro-telecom, basically look the same. It's the Republicans, the blue dogs, some CBC members and some CHC members, usually the men, and they all have essentially the same set of positions, which are about an architecture of control.

I'm going to show you an invitation, because I worked very hard on a primary campaign against Al Wynn. Now, if you look at this invitation that he sent out a few weeks before the election, it's a fundraiser for Al Wynn, an AT&T fellow PAC, Comcast Corp, Qwest PAC and Embark employer PAC, Team [Willow] PAC, Time Warner Cable PAC. This one's actually fine because it's Verizon's Good Government Committee. [Laughter.] But we've got James Clyburn, who's the Whip of the Democrats, and John Dingell, who is the Chair of Energy and Commerce, which is a very powerful committee, Representative G.K. Butterfield, Bobby Rush and Ed Towns. This is the architecture of control and the people behind it.

It's important to understand the roots of the power of these telecom companies. Is it just that they have a lot of money? It's that they are regional in nature and they have a hundred years of history in every state, municipality and in the federal government. They have deep relationships with these members of Congress. They know the law. They know the law in each of these states. They know how to break the law. They have deep ties in both parties. Terry McAuliffe made $15 million off of Global Crossing, which then ended up costing shareholders billions of dollars. He was the head of the DNC and then the Chairman of Senator Clinton's campaign. And we obviously have a lot of politicians that are owned by the telecom industry. That's just one example, but that could be replicated across D.C.

Trent Lott and John Breaux, in a nice example of post-partisanship, started a lobbying firm. John Breaux is a Democratic Senator from Louisiana. Trent Lott is a Republican Senator from Mississippi. They started a lobbying firm. They worked with two issues: net neutrality and FISA from the telecom side.

So what you have, essentially, is a Congress owned by politicians who are loyal to the telecom industry. And the telecom industry essentially believes in an architecture of control, because control equals predictability and that is a core business goal. There's also a little bit of Texas authoritarianism in there, but that's essentially what you're talking about.

Now, what do we believe? We believe in an architecture of openness. We fight using tools of openness. And I want to kind of draw out a place where we've made a huge amount of progress, and why it's incredibly significant that we have made such progress, and that is the net neutrality fight. Net neutrality is designed to protect the one area of communications where we actually have a good deal of freedom, and that is the Internet.

You'll notice that the FCC essentially is going to level some sort of penalty against Comcast for its BitTorrent – essentially, filtering of the Internet – and that is only happening because of the immense pressure that was put on the FCC by Democrats in the House because of the large popular uprising that we put forward. It's worth noting – and this is new that I'll announce early next week – that every major Senate Democratic challenger has come out in support of net neutrality. [Applause.] And we're going to go up on the House next because we want to make that coalition of people, progressive Democrats who are good on this issue, we want to make that a majority.

Now, the reason that we're able to do this is because we have a platform, a set of tools, and a set of organized people, many of whom are exceptional – a lot of you out there are people who have done this – but also the people on this panel who are just extraordinary, who are willing to fight. But it's important to put this in context and to explain why it's so significant.

Every major communications technology that has emerged – talking about radio, television, cable, wire service...well, I don't know about that – they had this moment of democratization where, in the '20s, there was immense amounts of amateur use of the radio. Then eventually, lobbyists in D.C. were able to tweak obscure laws that essentially placed these communication technologies in the hands of large corporations. And no one really noticed at the time that this was happening until it was too late. And it happened with radio, and then that segued into television, and then that segued into cable.

The Internet is the first technology where the public itself went out and protested and fought back against this same tactic. Now, we call it net neutrality, and there's a lot of argument; “Well, it's too hard to frame it” and everything like that. And the interesting thing is that it doesn't matter, the framing; we were able to win the fight, for the first time, frankly, in American history around preserving the tools of openness that we use to fight back against these people.

But as we see with FISA, we have a long way to go; we have a lot of fighting to do. And fundamentally, as we move forward, we have to recognize this is not a fight about who wiretaps who or whether the Internet will be open; it's not a fight about innovation. It's a fight about who we are as a people, and whether we're going to tolerate being in a society where a small group of people control us – control what we see, hear and think – or whether we're going to do that for ourselves. So I look forward to hearing the conversation now.

Tim Karr

Thanks, Matt. [Applause.] We're running a little long, so I really want to go straight to questions, because I imagine there are quite a few out there. Just for the sake of the recording, I'm going to be repeating your question into the mike. Okay, Will's going to be moving the mic around the room.

Matt Stoller

Can I just say something? Apparently the EFF gives out those metal Bills of Rights.
Cindy

If you join EFF...and my Executive Director would kill me if I got to the end of a presen-tation without asking you to join EFF if you're not already a member. As a gift, we can send you what we call the Bill of Rights, security edition, which is the Bill of Rights on a little piece of metal. And you, too, can walk through security and go, "Huh, it must have been my rights."

Tim Karr

All right, we had a question back here in the green shirt.

Audience Member

So we have a number of both formal and informal organizations doing really important work on this issue. EFF, for example, is sort of leading the charge on the legal side. Free Press, I guess, we could say you're an advocacy organization. Is that how you describe yourself?

Tim Karr

Yeah, we're policy advocates.

Audience Member

Okay. So what I was sort of hoping is if someone could kind of give us a quick lay of the land of the ecology of what are the different players here on our side of the issue. And in particular, the thing that I noticed is Glen Greenwald and the FISA fundraising became a center of activity. But there doesn't seem like there is really an established organization with explicitly political goals that's fundraising to support and defeat candidates. And I was wondering either if you could correct me if I'm wrong on that, or give us hope that one will arise to do that sort of thing.

Matt Stoller

There isn't anything right now. I mean, there's a lot of organizations that do some stuff that's similar to it. MoveOn is one. Sort of the large set of Internet contributions are moving to candidates who support these things. It's possible that Accountability Now, which is going to do a money bomb on August 8th, is going to focus on that. Part of the problem is that there are actually no primary candidates, and when you have a Democrat and a Republican who each support retroactive immunity, or you're not sure where the Democrat stands, it's pretty hard to actually figure out how to support another… Yeah, so I guess I don't have a great answer there, except that just the large network is, I think, naturally moving money to candidates who are good on this.

Michael Kieschnick

I'll just add one. I think it's only modest and inadvertent, but I did a look at the DFA federal candidate list. If you look at who they have endorsed, zero percent of their candidates have received telecom money, and 100% of the incumbents that they're opposing have received AT&T money. So there's at least a proxy for some of this work.

Audience Member

I have several questions, but the first one is, I understand why you highlight the splitter, because from the splitter on it's illegal, so it sort of doesn't matter what happens after the splitter. But just for my own edification, how much do we know about what they actually do with all that data once it gets split off?

Cindy Cohn

Very little, honestly. I mean, we know some of the tools. And by the way, I talked about the splitter because we've got good evidence about it, but there's also really good evidence about data mining your…about giving the government open access to your phone records as well. AT&T has a big database called Daytona that stores what makes your phone bill. And there is pretty good evidence across the board, including admissions from members of Congress, that they opened up that database to the government. So it's not just the stuff in transit, but also the stored records that are being handed over to the NSA.

We don't really know too much about what they're doing. We know some of the capa-bilities. The easiest way to think about it, we certainly know that term searches and word searches are kind of kid stuff compared to the kind of algorithmic searching that you can do on this, and we know the machine that they're using. It's called a [Neris]. They're made in San Jose, right near where I'm from. And we know what the Neris is capable of. The Neris is capable of real-time listening, as a computer listens, and being able to put together voice communications as well as digital communications, and reconstruct phone conversations in real time, with a lot of communications at the same time.

So one of the things that kind of started out this debate a couple years ago was, well, you know, who cares if they're wiretapping everybody? They can't really listen to everybody at the same time. And I think that to the extent that you still hold that thought in your brain, you should probably squelch it, because the techniques that they're able to use now mean that effectively they can and are listening or analyzing communications, in real-time, of a whole lot of people at the same time. The picture of the one guy with the alligator clips listening in on the calls, and he can't listen in on every one is...we're way, way past that now with the level of surveillance they can do. But as for specifics, we don't know yet, and I think it will emerge.

Tim Karr

There's an interesting point here that Cindy touched upon – this is the technology. Some of you will be hearing more and more about this idea, if you haven't heard about it already, of deep packet inspection technology, which is basically the technology that opens your envelope when you send a message on the Internet and looks inside. The RIAA is interested in partnering with AT&T to open that envelope and see whether you're trading so-called pirated materials. But it's also being used by companies like NebuAd, which is interested now in looking at your decisions via the Web so that they can push ads to you.

Deep packet inspection technology is part of the problem, but you should look beyond it to the companies that are actually creating this. And so when we got involved in fighting Comcast, they were using a technology from Sandvine, which is a Canadian company, that allowed them to look at your Web traffic and decide whether you wanted to use a BitTorrent application and you were sharing files, and then to interfere with it.

When Free Press got involved with this with a number of groups and we filed a petition and complaint at the FCC, at that time Sandvine was considered a buy; it was a moving company. And within months of our petition filing, they changed the rating and its stock value has dropped some 50% since this action.

So you should look at the companies as well, and also consider that this sort of activism and organizing that we're doing on this actually has real economic consequences, and that by taking on a lot of these corporations through these legal procedures, you can actually cause damages. And now Sandvine, which is a company that is potentially a threat to our online freedoms, is now reeling.

Matt Stoller

I believe Sandvine also sold to the Burmese government.

Tim Karr

Yeah, that's interesting. And a lot of the deep packet inspection technology companies are based in the United States, and they're looking to China and Burma as potential clients, but they're also having deals with AT&T.

Cindy Cohn

On the upside, though, there are technologies that you can use to try to give yourself at least a little bit of better protection for some of your communications, encripting your email, which can still be a bit of a pain in the ass but is getting easier and easier, is one way to make it pretty hard to do deep packet inspection on you, and certainly makes it harder for them to do the kind of drift net surveillance that they're doing now, and forces them into more targeted surveillance.

There's a tool called TOR, which stands for The Onion Router, which is a way that you can surf the Internet and do your browsing in a way that makes it very, very hard to track as well. And so there are tools on both sides. I would say that the tools on our side of this fight are not as slick or as developed or as easy for novices to use as I'd like them to be. But I'm usually talking to techs, and that's my challenge, usually, to the techs, is think about user interface; make this easy for your grandmother to use, because she needs it.

Audience Member

Blair with Music for Democracy. I guess what I have to say here is, it's so great that we have you guys really watching over us and trying to really make this fight continue. But in the age of the iPhone, in the age of Facebook and gmail, we have young people who are kind of in this position. And I know personally a lot of people who didn't want to take that first step and get on Facebook and get on gmail and get the iPhone. But once we make the blind step, there's almost no going back.

So what do you guys have to say to young people out there, and people in general, who are wired and have an interest in that convenient lifestyle and that culture, but want to be able, in their own personal lives, to have an alternative, to make a decision that both connects them to what they need to be pursuing for their lives, but also shows them that there is an alternative and that they can both be wired and make an alternative decision that promotes the freedom that they want?

Tim Karr

Well, it's a perfect question because we have CREDO Mobile on the panel, which is an alternative in a lot of respects. Do you want to answer that, Mike?

Michael Kieschnick

Yes, but not with a commercial pitch. I mean, first they should free the iPhone, right?

Cindy Cohn

Free the phones! Free the phones!

Michael Kieschnick

They need to free the iPhone. And the second thing you should do is you should write Steve Jobs and ask him to lobby on your behalf; have a Facebook activism group both to free the iPhone and to lobby Congress. Apple does have Al Gore on the board, let's not forget that. So I think you have to become consumer activists if you're addicted to that interface, and I can't speak to that. But you should become a consumer activist, and there's no excuse for not being that.

Tim Stoller

And just to add to that, it's very apt to be talking about cell phones. More and more young people, as cell phones become more sophisticated, this will be their point of access, point of connection. Cell phones and the wireless marketplace has a whole different policy framework behind it that allows the AT&Ts and the Verizons of the world, as Nancy experienced, to be much more predatory with your freedoms. And net neutrality is a fight right now that's largely being fought over wired line, broadband access.

The fight for net neutrality over wireless connections is a whole other battle, but it's a battle that we're going to fight. And we have to make sure, as people make the transition from iPhone... And remember, there are more cell phones out there than there are compu-ters in the world. The cell phone is going to be very prolific, and it's going to be that tool. In the future, we may even look at our laptops the same way we look at 8-track tapes today. They really are burdensome, and cell phones will be that point of access. So we really need to start thinking about wireless, and we need to think about how do we protect these essential freedoms.

Matt Stoller

There is a white space guy coming. You want to talk about white spaces?

Cindy Cohn

Oh, no, go right ahead.

Matt Stoller

I'm talking to Tim.

Tim Karr

Yeah, there are proceedings. We don't want to wonk out a little bit here, but spectrum is really important when it comes to wireless, obviously, and the policies that govern carriers are policies that basically deal with spectrum. Spectrum is becoming more abundant, not because there's more of it, but we have technology that allows us to use it in really more creative ways. And there is a slice of spectrum that's called white spaces. It's more relevant to people who live in rural areas than in urban areas, but if some of you still have the old rabbit ear television set and you switch your channels, there are channels that are fuzzy.

White spaces are the areas on the television airwaves, the slice of spectrum that's used for television broadcasting – that is, between the channels; those fuzzy stations. And if you're in a rural area, there are quite a few. Right now the FCC, the Federal Communi-cations Commission, is looking at the possibility of returning white spaces for other uses. They're perfectly suited for wireless Internet transmissions, and what we're lobbying for is to get out of the cycle of licensing our airwaves to these carriers who pay a high price, or to broadcasters who get it for free but they don't share it, and looking at the white spaces and making them available in an unlicensed capacity.

That means, basically, that as long as the technology that you build is compatible and gets on white spaces and it doesn't interfere with adjacent channels, anybody can go on there. There can be competing broadband providers that can have a white spaces Internet device, which is basically your new cell phone, that will allow you to get online and to not have to worry about the middlemen in these sorts of carriers.

So look for it. There's a long discussion here that I don't feel I need to get into because it gets very technical. But think about white spaces. When you hear that and you're inter-ested in it, a lot of our groups, Free Press especially, we're working with other organiza-tions. The New American Foundation and others are going to be doing a lot of work that will free up these white spaces in a way, especially rural areas, that can make Internet access much more feasible for people. And we can also create a sort of neutral environ-ment for wireless Internet access.

Cindy Cohn

On the privacy side, there are a couple of core legal doctrines that we just have to kill. And the fundamental one is the one that says when you give your person information to a third party, it pretty much becomes their information and you don't have any control over it anymore. And this is why, when you put stuff on Facebook, or as YouTube users recently learned, was when Viacom sued YouTube, suddenly they can find out everything that you watch on YouTube, because YouTube has that information and they have to turn it over.

Now, we were able to negotiate a deal with Viacom where they're not going to use this information to go after anybody else and it's going to get anonymized before they get it in the first instance, and that's because we had a little leverage over Viacom because they don't want to look like they're more evil than Google right now.

But we're moving into this airway they call 'cloud computing.' But I think the thing that people need to pay attention to is that they think it's their cloud. But it's your home; it's your data; it's your information. And I don't mean yours in terms of ownership. I'm not sure ownership of your data is the way to go in order to fix this problem.

But you have an interest in it that needs to continue even if you give it to someone else to hold. The fact that instead of your personal correspondence being in your house, your personal correspondence is sitting with Google should not make a difference in how secure you are, and how the 4th Amendment applies to this.

So we have to kill this idea, and it's one of the big things EFF is going to be working on for a while. But it's a hard battle.

So there are two or three basic principles that I think will let us move into this area. I mean, I'm pro-tech; I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for god's sakes. We're not comfortable with a "Just don't use the cool stuff" as a message. We need to fix the cool stuff so it's cool and privacy-protected and protects your free speech rights – that your liberties makes it intact into cyberspace.

Nancy Keenan

I just need to add a little bit. I look across the faces in this room and I'm quite amazed at the age, in a way, with all due respect, being one of those generations. We're working with a group called Label Networks, which does social marketing and basically polling of 13- to 30-year-olds. And your point, well taken, that that is cell phones, the iPhone, is the identity of this cohort of, if you will, young people. They have $162 billion purchase power in this country. Their knowledge of history is three years. And, they don't differentiate between alive people (George Bush), dead people (Martin Luther King), or avatars. In their world, they're all the same.

So I think as we begin to try to make the case of why privacy and why net neutrality and why that all is important, we need to be having a real clear understanding of this market of 13- to 30-year-olds. And they don't do it just in this country – they do it around the world.

And what happens in China, quite honestly, is happening in Japan, or is happening in other parts of this, world, it's amazing how quickly, because of the technology, it ends up in this country in the kinds of fashion we're seeing, in the kinds of technology, and the kinds of communication that they're using. So that's a little sidebar here. But it is a fascinating study about the generation that I think is going to have to follow and maintain the kinds of privacy issues that we who are in the middle of it right now have to figure out how we're communicating with them.

Tim Karr

We're quickly running out of time, but I want to take some more questions. Is that Matt back there? Yeah.

Audience Member

[Matt:] So I think one of the pieces of information that's come out over the past few years that's most compelling to me was the testimony of AT&T whistleblower Mark Kline. And I know Cindy and some other folks were trying really hard to get him in front of Congress to testify on the NSA wiretapping and the switches in San Francisco and elsewhere around the country. And I wanted to hear from Cindy but also Matt, and maybe anyone else who has ideas: First of all, why weren't we able to get Mark Kline testifying under oath? And second of all, how can this community of progressive activists help put pressure on Congress to make that testimony take place at some point in the future?

Tim Karr

I just want to say that Matt was working with Senator Chris Dodd in his presidential race. And Senator Dodd had some of the more progressive positions on telco policy, and I credit Matt and a lot of his colleagues for really pushing this ___. [Applause.]

Cindy Cohn

Yeah, Senator Dodd is a great hero in all of this. And I don't know the answer to this. I took Mark to D.C., right, because they wouldn't bring him. Nobody would ask him. So with help from some friends, we got some money together and we took him to D.C. and we held a press conference. Senator Dodd gave us the Banking Committee room – beautiful room – to hold a press conference with Mark so he could say... You know, this diagram I showed you – this is all the evidence that Mark gave.

I have a couple of theories, but I don't really know why. One of them is, I think there was a strange thing that happened in Congress in that the people... Well, first of all, nobody in Congress was actually briefed about the breadth of what the wiretapping was. Several of the Intelligence Committee people – first from the Senate and the group of eight, and then it grew to the full Intelligence Committees – were given some sort of briefing, and then sworn to secrecy about what they knew.

And I wonder, to the extent that they all seem just terrified... I mean, there's an Executive Order signed by this President Bush that says you cannot use classified information to hide illegal behavior. You can't use the classified information categorization to hide illegal behavior. But nonetheless, it seemed to me that there were a lot of members of Congress who were scared to death to talk about what they knew because they were told it was classified and that they would look like they were endangering national security. And I wonder whether bringing Mark and having him testify would have brought them too close to this thing that they're scared to death of.

I remain flummoxed, and I know Mark as well; Mark is extremely upset about the fact that nobody ever asked him formally to come talk about what he did. And I'd love to see it. I mean, there was a House committee that talked about State secrets privilege; they could've invited him. The Judiciary Committee held several meetings and they just kind of went to the usual suspects, some of whom are our friends, but all in D.C., to come talk about this. And nobody's asked Mark formally what it is he knows, and I think it's a big tragedy.

Tim Karr

We're already over our time. I want to just take one more question, and then we can follow up in person. Matt, did you have a follow-up?

Matt Stoller

Actually, I just want to say something about that. A lot of them believe in the surveillance state. It's pretty simple.

Cindy Cohn

Yep. I think he's right.

Tim Karr

Matt, did you want to follow up? I'm sorry, in front of Matt. Sorry. I thought it was your hand there.

Audience Member

Some of your organizations, especially Free Press, has done a great job of using the new media to kind of save the new media. But that, at least right now, is a limited audience. Is there any way to push this onto the mainstream media?

Tim Karr

Well, you've heard it a lot this weekend inasmuch as a lot of the mainstream media, actually – some of them don't like to admit it – but they do read blogs, and the blogs have been really good on this. We're an organization that has a very robust communications team, although Craig's, who's our Communications Director over here, might not agree with that – [laughs] – that has done a really successful job of making issues like net neutrality palatable to reporters for AP.

We obviously have a lot more work to do, and I think that you, as people who care about this issue, should also make it a regular practice to send letters to editors. A lot of mainstream news reports also have an online counterpart that allows comments or to dig a story on these issues. And when there's that sort of response from this community, and we're large – we have over a million and a half people who have done some sort of activism around net neutrality – the mainstream media sees there's an interest out there and they'll pursue it and they'll follow up, and it'll become more of a mainstream story.

Matt Stoller

And let's not forget: it is a mainstream story. I mean, when AT&T censored Pearl Jam, that was a big deal. It got into the press. When Obama repeated FISA illegal wiretapping, [we could?] leave in [sic], it was a big story. I mean, these things become big stories just because the conventional wisdom is that no one's heard of net neutrality or FISA or anything. It doesn't mean that the press hasn't been reporting on it. So I think they have more than I would have thought.

Tim Karr

And Adam Green, who was here earlier, [a tech] president put together this project called Ten Questions, where they got the candidates to agree to answer ten questions that were put forth in video via this Web site and then were voted on by people. And through our community, we managed to push the net neutrality question to number one.

And we got all of the candidates on a very public forum – on MTV – for Obama at least to respond to these questions. So there are ways that we can actually... The media follows us in a lot of ways, and it doesn't take millions of people to get a story on the front page of Digg, or to be the most favorite, the most-read story in the New York Times. It takes 100, 200 people who are well organized.

Michael Kieschnick

Let me just throw a couple more things in. Honestly, I think that these issues have gotten more press than I ever would have thought, say, going back two years. So I think perhaps the communications division has done pretty well; I think the blogs have done pretty well. Because the mainstream press – meaning the commercial press – the commercial press is fundamentally the enemy on this. They are not in favor of any openness.

And I think we do have some opportunities with our Congressional candidates, some of whom are in favor, right? I mean, Donna Edwards was great on this issue and got some coverage. It's worth mentioning that my friend, Jan Brown over here, whose husband, Charlie's, running for Congress – who used to work for the NSA. So it'd be a really nice thing to have a former employee of the NSA who's totally good on these issues there to speak clearly and call out the nonsense that passes for debate.

But I think we've done pretty well with the press so far.

Tim Karr

All right. We're out of time, but thank you very much for _____. [Applause.] Do spend some time at Free Press and EFS and Credo Mobile. We're all doing good work.