[Corporations] The Spy Who Bills Us

[radtimes]

The Spy Who Bills Us

http://www.tcf.org/list.asp?type=NC&pubid=1222

Patrick Radden Keefe, The Century Foundation
2/23/2006

When your phone bill arrives this month, you might want to take a moment to 
think about how much you trust your telephone company. While the National 
Security Agency has gotten a lot of press since it was revealed in December 
that its analysts engaged in the warrantless surveillance of US citizens, 
the eavesdropping agency would not have been able to conduct the operation 
without the intimate—and likely illegal—cooperation of private 
telecommunications providers.

After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the NSA adopted a bold new 
approach. Seeking more unfettered access to the vast communications 
channels that run through the country, the agency approached executives at 
major telecommunications companies and requested that they provide the NSA 
with secret backdoors into the hubs and switches through which our 
telephone calls and e-mails are routed. Whereas the Foreign Intelligence 
Surveillance Act requires spies to obtain individual warrants for each 
target in an investigation, the phone companies provided unfiltered access 
to the full current of communications—not just Al Qaeda's calls, but 
everyone else's as well.

One problem with this approach is that it's like drinking from a fire hose. 
The NSA intercepts about 650 million communications worldwide every day, 
and, in something of a paradox, the better the agency is at hoovering in 
phone calls and e-mails, the worse it is at isolating critical and timely 
information from the white noise. According to recent reports, few of the 
tips the agency generated from its wiretapping program resulted in the 
identification of actual terrorists or plots.

Another problem is that trolling indiscriminately through the 
communications stream is illegal. The mechanism for eavesdropping 
established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is simple: Target 
first, eavesdrop second. If there are grounds to suspect that a person is a 
terrorist or agent of a foreign power, a warrant is granted to spy on that 
person. With this new program, the agency has inverted the traditional 
steps: Eavesdrop first, then identify targets within the stream of 
intercepted communications.

Thus far, administration officials have successfully resisted efforts by 
Congress to address the probable inefficiency and definite illegality of 
this procedure, but in outsourcing the logistics of the operation to 
private telecommunications companies, they may have made a crucial error. 
Employees of the president might argue that ''executive privilege" frees 
them from responding to congressional inquiries about sensitive national 
security operations, but the CEOs of the telecom companies have no such 
easy out. Earlier this month, USA Today reported that AT&T, MCI, and Sprint 
are three of the companies that secretly cooperate with the NSA. Democratic 
Senators Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Russell Feingold of 
Wisconsin have written to the companies, asking about their involvement in 
the program, and if the Bush administration continues to resist 
congressional inquiries, the senators could subpoena executives of the 
companies and oblige them to explain their involvement.

Times of national crisis grant a certain license to the executive branch, 
and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has argued, in effect, that as long 
as officials are endeavoring to keep the country safe, they need not answer 
questions about the particular means they employ to do so. Private 
companies have no such license, and AT&T, MCI, and Sprint should not be 
able to hide from the senators or from their own customers. If it is 
determined—as it probably will be—that the wiretapping program was illegal, 
then the telecom companies are guilty of violating federal law. In the 
meantime, it's clear that they have violated their own customer privacy 
policies. You might want to take another look at yours.

Patrick Radden Keefe, is a program officer and fellow at The Century 
Foundation. He is the author of Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World 
of Global Eavesdropping. This article originally appeared in the Boston 
Globe on February 23, 2006.

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