Wall Street wasn't pleased with Apple (AAPL)'s first-quarter earnings report. The company sold fewer iPhones than expected in the holiday period.

Apple has problems, but beating analyst expectations is the least of them. CEO Tim Cook hinted at the challenge in a rare interview with ABC News last week. Asked about government intrusion into Apple's user data, Cook said:

"We need to say what data is being given, how many people it affects, how many accounts are affected… We need to be clear and we have a gag order on us right now, and so we can't say those things.

"Much of what has been said isn't true. There is no back door. The government doesn't have access to our servers. They would have to cart us out in a box for that — and that just will not happen. We feel that strongly about it."

As I said about President Obama last week, what Cook didn't say is just as important as what he said. He did not say, "The government can't get our customers' private data." Instead, he said, "The government doesn't have access to our servers." That is a completely different statement.

Cook is, however, correct about the gag order. Apple and other cloud service providers routinely receive "national security letters" from the federal government. Banks and private citizens get them, too. They are shockingly common.

If you receive a national security letter, you are legally required to give the government private information about a third party — one of your users, in Apple's case. You are also legally required not to tell the subject that his "private" data is no longer private.

A national security letter is not a search warrant. No judge reviews them. They are administrative letters from executive branch agencies, typically the FBI, that order businesses to lie and deceive their own customers.

As you might expect, this practice is not good for business. The U.S. technology sector's cooperation with national security letter fishing expeditions is costing its shareholders billions of dollars in lost overseas sales.

Apple is only the tip of the iceberg, too. Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo, (YHOO), Facebook (FB), Twitter (TWTR) and others get NSLs all the time. This week they triumphantly made a deal with the government. Now they can divulge some very limited information on the aggregate number of national security letters and search warrants they receive.

They still cannot tell you, or any individual, that the FBI has a hand-delivered list of all the web sites you visited, copies of all your e-mails, or the photos you saved on your phone.

Tim Cook, Steve Ballmer of Microsoft or Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook can easily change this situation if they don't like it. All they have to do is refuse.

Apple, for instance, could tell the FBI and the National Security Agency, "No, we won't comply." Nothing stops them from doing this right now.

Won't the government be angry? Yes, of course. Will Marshall Dillon show up to throw Tim Cook in jail? Possibly, but Cook already said he is willing to be "carted out in a box" in at least some circumstances. Was he serious?

If you really mean what you said, Tim Cook, you should call Obama's bluff. Stop obeying those unconstitutional "national security letters" that do nothing to make the nation more secure. Announce your decisions publicly. If they come to arrest you, go peacefully and willingly.

If you do this, Tim, the world will stand behind you and your revenues will soar. Apple will sell iPhones as fast as they can build them.

If you lead the way, others will follow and the entire surveillance state apparatus will collapse within weeks. Civil disobedience worked very well for South Africa's Nelson Mandela, whose funeral our own president recently attended. It brings on change when nothing else works. Obama knows this very well. The last thing he wants to see is an American Mandela.

Tim Cook, you have the power to change history. Your latest iPad TV spot quotes Walt Whitman's beautiful American poetry: "The powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse."

Answer the challenge, Mr. Cook. "What will your verse be?"