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Eighty years ago AT&T was quite the different company when it came to privacy of its customers and free speech. A quote lifted from a Boing Boing post on Thursday where AT&T spoke out against warrantless surveillance, "The telephone has become part and parcel of the social and business intercourse of the people of the United States, and this telephone system offers a means of espionage to which general warrants and writs of assistance were the puniest instruments of tyranny and oppression."
Flash forward to 2006, the EFF files a class action lawsuit against AT&T for its collaboration with the NSA in its wiretapping and data mining of customer data. Because, as we all know, fighting the war on terrorism means you should have no expectation of privacy. It's for your own safety people.
The latest act of that oppression that AT&T previously fought against, was its censorship of Pearl Jams anti-Bush lyrics at Lollapalooza (or, the festival we promised not to speak of again until next year). 
The AT&T "Blue Room" offered those without the dough or stamina the opportunity to watch some of the acts perform on the Blue Room website. Here, the lyrics were censored. The lyrics that were censored were, "George Bush, leave this world alone" and "George Bush, find yourself another home", during the cover of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall".
Pearl Jam immediately posted the following to their website, "This, of course, troubles us as artists but also as citizens concerned with the issue of censorship and the increasingly consolidated control of the media." The worry Pearl Jam was expressing was one that is troubling many a artist these days, those large and influential companies are literally controlling what we see, hear, and do.
On Thursday AT&T responded to the criticism and placed the blame on a mistake by the Webcast vendor they used for the broadcast. Pearl Jam has both versions of the song on there website and AT&T said they are working with Pearl Jam to put the uncensored version on the "Blue Room" website.
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follow this up. according to wired, at&t has been doing this for a while with artists like the flaming lips and john butler trio...who knows who else?
http://blog.wired.com/music/2007/08/has-att-censore.html
Why would anyone censor such a boring opinion?
Don't like the least popular president since polling began? Wow! How radical and dangerous!
Someone should follow up on Davie-Brown Entertainment,the vendor AT&T uses to censor web casts. Davie-Brown, originally organized by Pepsico to get placement for Pepsico products in films is but one head of a hydra called the Omnicom Group. Other parts of Omnicom are involved in political PR. Could one or more of them have a contract with the RNC or Bush?
Honestly, as silly as the censorship thing is, you can't expect to headline a festival like Lollapalooza and be on a major and receive all the perks of superstardom without counting on things of this kind to happen due to the corporate interest in your venture. Vedder and co. have been "fighting" this sort of thing since I was a wee teenager, and its a bit tiresome for them to be playing gigantic venues with tens of thousands of screaming fans and have rabid radio play and expect that the corporations keeping them well-fed and -heeled don't want to maintain the status quo.
If they (or anyone) are truly interested in speaking freely and not being beholden to anyone's interests, they need to spout all their opinions about Ticketmaster and venues and bad presidents from the understanding comfort on an independent label (a certain Omaha native takes the same stance on all those issues and has a pretty easy time of it on his indie label).
Can't have it both ways...if anyone is counting on the MSM to play nice and be honest, then you have my pity.