Cover-Up

There's one man in America most qualified to answer questions about warrantless wiretapping and this push for telecom immunity. His name is Mark Klein. He worked for AT&T when he discovered a secret NSA surveillance room on Folsom Street in San Francisco. He has clearly and succinctly explained why telecom immunity would be a great tragedy for this country.

Klein explained why he traveled all the way from San Francisco to lobby Senators about the issue: if the immunity provision passes, Americans may never know how extensive the surveillance program was -- or how deeply their privacy may have been invaded.

"The president has not presented this truthfully," said Klein, a 62-year old retiree. "He said it was about a few people making calls to the Mideast. But I know this physical equipment. It copies everything. There's no selection of anything, at all -- the splitter copies entire data streams from the internet, phone conversations, e-mail, web-browsing. Everything." [...]

Its very location in San Francisco suggests that the program was "massively domestic" in its focus, he said. "If they really meant what they say about only wanting international stuff, you wouldn't want it in San Francisco or Atlanta. You'd want to be closer to the border where the lines come in from the ocean so you pick up international calls. You only do it in San Francisco if you want domestic stuff. The location of this stuff contradicts their story."

We still don't know, nearly two years after the initial revelations, the extent to which Americans have been spied upon by their own government. And without allowing the legal process to move forward, we'll never know. What's already in the public domain is shocking.

Beginning in February 2001, almost seven months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the government's top electronic eavesdropping organization, the National Security Agency, asked a major U.S. telecommunications carrier for information about its customers and the flow of electronic traffic across its network, according to sources familiar with the request. The carrier, Qwest Communications, refused, believing that the request was illegal unless accompanied by a court order [...]

However, in February 2001, the NSA's primary purpose in seeking access to Qwest's network apparently was not to search for terrorists but to watch for computer hackers and foreign-government forces trying to penetrate and compromise U.S. government information systems, particularly within the Defense Department, sources said. Government officials have long feared a "digital Pearl Harbor" if intruders were to seize control of these systems or other key U.S. infrastructures through the Internet.

A former White House official, who at the time was involved in network defense and other intelligence programs, said that the early 2001 NSA proposal to Qwest was, "Can you build a private version of Echelon and tell us what you see?" Echelon refers to a signals intelligence network operated by the NSA and its official counterparts in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.

Uh, OK, it was only "hackers" you were interested in. I see. And regardless, it's still an illegal action. Their excuse was that they were only tracking "metadata" like the phone number or the length of a call, and that's not technically an invasion of privacy. As emptywheel notes, there's a ring of familiarity there.

This excuse sounds precisely like public denials about the program Hayden made after the NYT revealed the problem with the program involved data mining [...]

In January, 2006, Gen. Michael Hayden: Let me talk for a few minutes also about what this program is not. It is not a driftnet over Dearborn or Lackawanna or Freemont grabbing conversations that we then sort out by these alleged keyword searches or data-mining tools or other devices that so-called experts keep talking about.

This is targeted and focused. This is not about intercepting conversations between people in the United States. This is hot pursuit of communications entering or leaving America involving someone we believe is associated with al Qaeda.


GEN. HAYDEN: You know, I tried to make this as clear as I could in prepared remarks. I said this isn't a drift net, all right? I said we're not there sucking up coms and then using some of these magically alleged keyword searches -- "Did he say 'jihad'?

In other words, faced with the anonymous description that the problem with the warrantless wiretap program had to do with data mining, Hayden neatly parsed that it couldn't be data mining because they didn't "[suck] up coms and then [use] some of those magically alleged keyword searches." Hayden denied that they had mined content, but he stopped well short of saying that they hadn't mined metadata.

Which strongly suggests that Michael Hayden was well aware that the NSA was mining metadata, long before 9/11.

Mr. Klein and Chris Dodd sat down for an interview, and it left the Senator more convinced than ever that this would be a grave injustice and legal travesty to grant retroactive immunity. The Judiciary Committee marks up this bill TOMORROW. It's time to contact anyone and everyone on that committee and tell them that the deceptions and lawbreaking of the Bush Administration cannot be allowed to vanish from history. They cannot put telecom companies above the law.