bruceb news

According to the Center for Responsible Politics, the Bells – Qwest, BellSouth, SBC Communications and Verizon – have contributed about $19.4 million to congressional campaigns since 1999.

Slightly less huge companies such as AT&T, Sprint and Worldcom have spent about $12.6 million over the same period.

Congress today gave away the store to the bigger contributors. The House passed sweeping legislation today to let the four Bell telephone giants sell Internet access nationwide and to relieve them of state and federal regulation. The bill would remove requirements in the 1996 Telecommunications Act that the regional Bell companies first open their networks to competitors before being allowed to offer high-speed Internet service nationwide. […] continued

I thought this was a particularly good discussion of the unfolding Enron scandal, well worth keeping in mind as the various players stake out their positions on the front page for the next six or eight months. It begins as a comparison of Whitewater and Enron at the same stage:

“I would argue that Enron is neither worse nor better than Whitewater at a similar stage of development. It’s the same. A year into Clinton’s first term, Republicans were pursuing a variety of Whitewater investigations as aggressively as they possibly could, despite the lack of any compelling evidence of wrongdoing by administration officials.

[…] continued

One of the pieces of legislation being reviewed to deal with terrorism would permit Internet surveillance without a court order. The scope of that surveillance was debated at a Congressional committee meeting on Tuesday. The bill’s advocates argue that prosecutors should be able to intercept e-mail headers (TO: and FROM:), since it’s analogous to what they can discover about incoming and outgoing phone calls. But they’re also requesting the right to intercept the addresses of all web sites visited, without a court order. And that’s a wildly different thing, eh? Wired Magazine quotes Senators Hatch and Schumer as saying that “Americans have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the identities of their e-mail correspondents, or the addresses of Web pages they visit.” Boy, that sounds flatly wrong to me. […] continued

There’s an interesting perspective in this column by Michael Kinsley about whether we should automatically accept the notion that life in America has permanently changed for the worse after the terrorist bombing. He says, “Life was riskier than we realized before Sept. 11 and is not as risky as we fear now. Resisting the conclusion that everything has changed is one way to help prevent it from being true.” Recommended reading.

Despite past differences, you may have the impression that America has been united by this tragedy. I offer this without further comment.

According to The Washington Post and the New York Times, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson said that liberal civil liberties groups, feminists, homosexuals and abortion rights supporters bear partial responsibility for Tuesday’s terrorist attacks. Falwell appeared on Robertson’s “700 Club” and the pair agreed that God gave the U.S. “what we deserve.”

The nation is entering into a debate about the relationship between privacy and national security. Regardless of where you stand, encourage the debate to be fair, reasonable, and deeply considered. A rush to cut off privacy and anonymity may seem tempting in light of the terrorist attacks, but our liberties are built on more than an obsession with security. As this article points out, Congress is already starting to be pressured to pass laws giving new power to law enforcement agencies for monitoring and decrypting e-mail and other electronic communications. One senator has already called for a global prohibition on encryption products without backdoors for government surveillance. […] continued

From Slate magazine:

The Wall Street Journal “Washington Wire” has Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s penetrating defense of the Bush energy plan’s proposed expansion of nuclear power: “If you set aside Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the safety record of nuclear is really very good.”

A good article by Jimmy Carter in the Washington Post about “misinformation and scare tactics” coming out of the Bush White House to justify environmental atrocities. Sample:

“No energy crisis exists now that equates in any way with those we faced in 1973 and 1979. World supplies are adequate and reasonably stable, price fluctuations are cyclical, reserves are plentiful, and automobiles aren’t waiting in line at service stations. Exaggerated claims seem designed to promote some long-frustrated ambitions of the oil industry at the expense of environmental quality.”