One Good Telco?: Qwest is apparently the only telephone company that remembers what its supposed to mean that we live in a democracy. If these reports are accurate, the Denver-based company is the only one of the large telcos to refuse to provide access to the telephone records of millions of Americans—the vast majority of them with no links to al-Qaeda or other terrorist organizations—to the National Security Agency.

This story has yet to make the leap from the progressive blogs (such as this and this) to the mainstream media, but as more details emerge it seems clear that the administration’s spying on Americans goes far beyond listening in on people who are holding regular friendly chats with known terrorists and that most telephone companies were complicit in what was almost certainly a massive infringement of civil rights.

If Qwest recognized that this program was illegal so did the others… but they went along with it anyway. To be honest, I’d like to see the executives responsible for that decision doing serious hard time, but at the very least they should be held accountable in the marketplace for betraying their customers en masse.