Neighbors Helping Officers

As if to prove my point (in a sense), the USA Today published a news article today describing how police officers in various locales are using volunteer citizens to help enforce speed limit bans.

Obviously, this kind of assistance helps enforce speed limits, and may help save lives. However, that technology is allowing for more perfect law enforcement and an enforcement rate far higher than conceivable when speed limits were passed. Such perfect enforcement distorts the original balance of enforcement rates, mortality rates, economic impacts, and convenience considered when the speed limits were passed. Perhaps maximum speed limits need to be reconsidered as a result.

More importantly, if such practices give private citizens the notion that helping police in something mundane like highway safety is their duty, then their prying into the lives of their neighbors is a modest natural progression of that mindset, eating away at our notions of privacy.

Buying Access, Telco Style

This topic is very close to my heart. My father left the Navy after the Korean War and started climbing poles for New York Telephone Company, working his way up from union man into middle management of New York Tel/NYNEX before retiring in the early 90s. I don’t think my father was ever prouder of me than when I secured my first real law job as junior internet attorney for Southern New England Telecom, which was purchased by SBC, a conglomeration of Regional Bell Operating Companies that became the mostly reconstituted AT&T after I left in 2000.

Ryan Singel blogs for THREAT LEVEL at Wired.com, and details Verizon and AT&T executives who have suddenly acquired an interest in helping out Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Senate Democrat from West Virginia. Sen. Rockefeller is running for reelection, and strangely enough, the scion of the still-vast Rockefeller fortune is scrapping for reelection funds. Apparently, Senator Rockefeller, sensitive to charges that he bought a Senate seat in poor West Virginia, promised his constituents that he would not dip into his family funds to help finance his political career. Now, he’s in a dogfight for reelection in a state whose constituents are far more conservative than he.

And... hey, I know someone on this list! James Ellis was General Counsel for SBC when I left the company and is now GC of AT&T, and wow, what is a Texan doing giving money to a Rockefeller? Kind of weirdly, anachronistically ironic.

Anyway, government wiretapping is a big issue these days, and could not be done without the help and complicity of the Telcos who own the Central Office space where most of the equipment used to create our cybertelephonic lives is located. With the Telcos being sued for this wiretapping, they are pulling out the lobbying machinery to make sure that they get their shield. So, a company like AT&T, with over 300,000 employees, can imply to some of its top executives that giving to Rockefeller would be a good thing.

And with the recent passage in the Senate of a bill granting telcos immunity for post-9/11 wiretapping, AT&T and their executives may have gotten their money’s worth. (to be continued)….