Wiretapping Update: House of Cards Crumbling

When we last left our story, we discovered that the NSA was seeking phone records for massive data mining well before 9/11. That's been corroborated by other lawsuits and filings.

...in May 2006, a lawsuit filed against Verizon for allegedly turning over call records to the NSA alleged that AT&T began building a spying facility for the NSA just days after President Bush was inaugurated. That lawsuit is one of 50 that were consolidated and moved to a San Francisco federal district court, where the suits sit in limbo waiting for the 9th Circuit Appeals court to decide whether the suits can proceed without endangering national security [...]

But Mayer and Nacchio may not even be the only two arguing that the NSA started a program of collecting Americans' phone records before 9/11.

In a January 2006 Slate article that came out before the USA Today totally blew open the call records story in May 2006, Tim Naftali and THREAT LEVEL pal Shane Harris reported:

"A former telecom executive told us that efforts to obtain call details go back to early 2001, predating the 9/11 attacks and the president's now celebrated secret executive order. The source, who asked not to be identified so as not to out his former company, reports that the NSA approached U.S. carriers and asked for their cooperation in a "data-mining" operation, which might eventually cull "millions" of individual calls and emails."

Now, this is specifically about data mining, taking in millions of calls and emails. There is no mention of actual access to the calls themselves until after 9/11. But clearly, the White House was ramping up for some kind of surveillance almost immediately, perhaps data mining from supposedly international sources which are routed through the United States. Today, it was revealed that Verizon executives have been giving up phone records on hundreds of occasions since 2005, an illegal act, by the way.

The company said it does not determine the requests' legality or necessity because to do so would slow efforts to save lives in criminal investigations.

The words "good" and "German" come to mind.

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.

The disclosures, in a letter from Verizon to three Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee investigating the carriers' participation in government surveillance programs, demonstrated the willingness of telecom companies to comply with government requests for data, even, at times, without traditional legal supporting documents. The committee members also got letters from AT&T and Qwest Communications International, but those letters did not provide details on customer data given to the government. None of the three carriers gave details on any classified government surveillance program.

Verizon detailed 720 of these "emergency requests" from government agencies, and other telecoms may have detailed even more if they weren't barred by the Director of National Intelligence, who invoked the state secrets privilege.

We're getting a fairly clear picture of near-constant collaboration between spying agencies and corporate telecommunications firms, in a manner where the telecoms are almost an arm of the government, in rampant violation of the Fourth Amendment. Yet Fred Hiatt, in his infinite wisdom, sees nothing wrong.

Let's leave to the side Hiatt's inane claim that these telecoms, in actively enabling the Bush administration to spy on their customers in violation of the law, were motivated by the pure and upstanding desire to be "patriotic corporate citizens" -- rather than, say, the desire to obtain extremely lucrative government contracts which would likely have been unavailable had they refused to break the law. Leave to the side the fact that actual "patriotism" would have led these telecoms to adhere to the surveillance and privacy laws enacted by the American people through their Congress in accordance with the U.S. Constitution -- as a handful of actual patriotic telecoms apparently did -- rather than submit to the illegal demands of the President [...]

There is no such thing as a "patriotism exception" to the laws that we pass. It is not a defense to illegal behavior to say that one violated the law for "patriotic" reasons. That was Oliver North's defense to Congress when he proudly admitted breaking multiple federal laws. And it is the same "defense" that people like North have been making to justify Bush's violations of our surveillance laws -- what we call "felonies" -- in spying on Americans without warrants.

By definition, the "rule of law" does not exist if government officials and entities with influential Beltway lobbyists can run around breaking the law whenever they decide that there are good reasons for doing so. The bedrock principle of the "rule of law" is that the law applies equally to everyone, even to those who occupy Important Positions in Fred Hiatt's social, economic and political circles and who therefore act with the most elevated of motives.

Indeed, we already know that the federal government is willing to lie about intelligence failures, blaming them on restrictive wiretap laws, and they're willing to use their lapdogs in the media to exploit the same intelligence failures to push for this opportunity. We're not dealing with honest brokers, and therefore you must call into question their agenda for wanting these spying powers. The Fred Hiatts of the world would rather reward and facilitate lawbreaking than defend the Constitution. Again, those words "good" and "German" come to mind.

UPDATE: John Conyers has some questions.