The Political Chase

Verizon Confirms Massive Surveillance, ATT Lawyers Up

Mr. President, can you hear me now?

Verizon has confirmed to Congress that it has had an open-door policy with the Bush administration — providing any information requested by “federal authorities,” regardless of whether the requests were accompanied by a court order or not. Although Verizon categorized National Security Letter (NSL) requests as subpoenas, technically and legally they are not the same. In fact, a federal judge recently ruled that NSL’s are a violation of the Fourth Amendment, and thereby unconstitutional.

Verizon Communications…told congressional investigators that it has provided customers’ telephone records to federal authorities in emergency cases without court orders hundreds of times since 2005.

 

Verizon also disclosed that the FBI, using administrative subpoenas, sought information identifying not just a person making a call, but all the people that customer called, as well as the people those people called. Verizon does not keep data on this “two-generation community of interest” for customers, but the request highlights the broad reach of the government’s quest for data.

 

From January 2005 to September 2007, Verizon provided data to federal authorities on an emergency basis 720 times…The records included Internet protocol addresses as well as phone data. In that period, Verizon turned over information a total of 94,000 times to federal authorities armed with a subpoena or court order.

Now, this is where things get very interesting — in other words, all the lies of the past and the enormous scope of lawbreaking merge.

First, why did Verizon provide records beginning in January 2005, rather than back to 2001? The Times exposed Bush’s illegal wiretapping program on December 16, 2005, but had evidence of the program for approximately one year before reporting it, which would reasonably parallel the period covered by Verizon. Is that mere coincidence?

The Bush administration has been using NSL’s at an increasing rate since the Patriot Act was passed in 2001. In March of this year, a Justice Department Inspector General issued a scathing report stating that since 9/11, the FBI had issued more than 20,000 NSL’s each year, and the demand increased with each year. Moreover, FBI Director Robert Mueller testified in March, that the FBI had issued 142,000 NSL’s between 2003 and 2005.

It is important to remember that the majority of information discussed thus far as well as the information provide by Verizon is specific to the FBI, and not the NSA. Furthermore, Verizon is the only company that has cooperated, and that is on a limited basis.

Last week, the Times reported that AT&T began development of a monitoring center for the NSA seven months before 9/11 that would ““give the N.S.A. direct, unlimited, unrestricted and unfettered access to phone call information and Internet traffic on AT&T’s network.” And today the Times is reporting that the “three biggest phone carriers have refused to tell members of Congress what role, if any, they had in the National Security Agency’s domestic eavesdropping program.”

So, if we take into consideration all that we know about Verizon, the FBI, and what we don’t know about the other companies including their refusal to even discuss the NSA’s wiretapping activities, is it not reasonable to assume the NSA is complicit?  Not according to DNI Mike McConnell. He testified on September 18 that no Americans had been spied upon without a court order and that there were only a few Americans that had been spied upon “legally.”

Listen to what he told House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers less than one month ago.

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Are we really supposed to believe that?