Re: <nettime> A CEO who resisted NSA spying is out of prison.

[Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>]

  [Cc: cypherpunks@cpunks.org, info@postbiota.org, zs-p2p@zerostate.is
    -- mod (tb)]

At 02:46 AM 10/4/2013, Eugen Leitl wrote:

> Just one major telecommunications company refused to participate in a
> legally dubious NSA surveillance program in 2001. A few years later,
> its CEO was indicted by federal prosecutors. He was convicted, served
> four and a half years of his sentence and was released this month.
> ...
> Nacchio was convicted of selling of Qwest stock in early 2001, not long
> before the company hit financial troubles.

I never liked Joe Nacchio, back when he and I used to work for the
same company. I didn't know him personally (he was probably a VP by
then, in a different organization); he was an aggressive sales guy who
liked to brag about his Porsche. But he was also insightful about the
state of the business even in the mid-80s, and anybody in 2000-2001
who didn't have a clue that the telcos were in for a world of trouble
had no business running one.

He might have had more specific knowledge about the specific troubles
Qwest was having, but besides the overall crash that the DotCom
boom was going through, the telcos had just done a huge round of
overbuilding on fiber, there was a glut of the stuff because everybody
was doing it, and DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing)
meant that you had to pour a huge amount of new capital into optical
hardware on the endpoints just to keep up with the Joneses, because
the price per bit-mile of the actual fiber you had in the ground was
dropping rapidly.



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