The ACLU Is Trying Back Door Pressure To Get Telecoms To Release NSA Spying Info

Which while a good idea in my playbook, is already facing opposition from those Government lackeys at AT&T.

Someone needs a good slap upside the head here.

BTW, this isn't something you are going to hear about in the media.

This is from a Email blast that I got.

BIG NEWS: We just did something that we’ve rarely done in nearly a century of ACLU history—to ramp up our efforts against massive NSA spying, we took the fight for civil liberties into the corporate boardroom.

The ACLU office in San Francisco, along with a coalition of major investors, filed shareholder proposals with AT&T and Verizon calling on both companies to reveal what customer information they hand over to U.S. or foreign governments and how often.

But we just got word that AT&T is trying to dodge the shareholder proposal by filing an objection with SEC regulators—so we need to act fast to add consumer pressure to all this heat from investors.

We’re working with our friends at SumOfUs to rally thousands of AT&T and Verizon customers and potential customers and prove to these giant telcos that their silence is putting their public image and bottom line at risk.

Let’s stand with AT&T and Verizon shareholders: Sign the petition calling on the telcos to come clean about how they share our private data.

Other companies, like Google, Apple and Microsoft, have issued transparency reports about government demands for our data and have called on Congress to lift gag orders so they can be even more transparent. But our telephone companies have been downright defiant about telling us what they’re doing with our private information.

Recently, Verizon executive John Stratton dismissed our legitimate privacy concerns and mocked other companies’ efforts to improve transparency, saying those companies wanted to “grandstand a bit, and wave their arms and protest loudly so as not to offend the sensibilities of their customers.”

Well Mr. Stratton, we happen to think it’s about time the telcos get more concerned about the ‘sensibilities’ of customers. In case you haven’t noticed, many of us aren’t too happy with our private data being handed over in secret to the government.

Let’s make sure Verizon and AT&T executives hear us loud and clear: Sign the petition calling on telcos to issue transparency reports now.

Every day, more and more details emerge about how massive the government surveillance state has become. In the fight to roll it back, we’ve made progress in Congress and we just made oral arguments in federal court for our case ACLU v. Clapper.

But we can't fight what we don't know about, which is why we need our phone companies to come clean.

Corporations care about one thing—their bottom line. With this action, now's our chance to let AT&T and Verizon know that if they don't step up, it's going to cost them investors and customers in a big way.