… The New York Times reported in December [2005] that since 9/11, leading telecommunications companies "have been storing information on calling patterns and giving it to the federal government to aid in tracking possible terrorists." Citing current and former government and corporate officials, the Times reported that the companies have granted the NSA access to their all-important switches, the hubs through which colossal volumes of voice calls and data transmissions move every second. 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 e-mails.
… USA Today reported in May 2006 that Qwest, unlike AT&T and Verizon, balked at helping the NSA track phone calling patterns that may have indicated terrorist organizational activities. Nacchio’s attorney, Herbert Stern, confirmed that Nacchio refused to turn over customer telephone records because he didn’t think the NSA program had legal standing. In the documents, Nacchio also asserts Qwest was in line to build a $2 billion private government network called GovNet and do other government business, including a network between the U.S. and South America. The documents maintain that Nacchio met with top government officials, including President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and then-National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice in 2000 and early 2001 to discuss how to protect the government’s communications network.
They portray U.S. government officials, even before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, worried about a "Pearl Harbor" type of attack on the Internet. As early as 1997, a three-star general talked to Nacchio about using Qwest’s new fiber-optic network for government purposes, according to the defense. One key meeting with a government official was held at Qwest founder Phil Anschutz’s ranch near Greeley, with former Chief Financial Officer Robin Szeliga prevented from attending presumably because she lacked security clearance. Nacchio was on a Bush-appointed national security telecommunications advisory panel. In March 2001, then-counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke asked the panel if it would be possible to build a private network for the government to protect it from cyberwarfare.
Nacchio piped up: "I already built this network twice" for other government agencies. The defense asserts Nacchio believed Qwest would be asked to build the network and that it could do so in six months. But the contract didn’t materialize.
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For clarification: No one is arguing that the danger from Terrorists is not real or that our vigilance in this regard is unimportant. We all watched the Twin Towers fall down too. One issue here is spying on all Americans. The balance in place is a review of domestic spying by a secret court, the F.I.S.A. court, and the Bush Administration has balked at that oversight – not just balked, has ignored the laws requiring it. Another issue is honesty. The Bush Administration has repeatedly claimed to be operating within the law. Looks like that claim is a great big lie. Finally, they’ve claimed that domestic surveillance is because of 9/11, but this story brings that claim into question.
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As always, the blogosphere’s investigative master, emptywheel, is all over this story:
- Groundbreaker and the Secret Request
- What Nacchio Tells Us about the NSA
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Did the NSA Ask for Data Mining Before or After 9/11?… This suggests that data mining occurred before 9/11, but only using data from purportedly international sources (as if they can tell one from another). In other words, if you take just Stern’s comment, the USA Today article, and the Slate article (and assuming all three are accurate), it appears that the difference between the February 2001 ask and the October 2001 ask may well have pertained to purportedly domestic data. I’m guessing, based on these articles, that they asked Nacchio in February 2001 to do data mining … and then they asked again, in October 2001, this time to do data mining using data from Americans.
- When you look at emptywheel’s analysis, she’s concluded that the unwarranted domestic spying did not start before 9/11. We left-sided bloggers would love to nail the Administration by claiming that their whole Change America into a Police State thing started before 9/11. emptywheel concludes otherwise. I’ve been raving about the Limbaugh/O’Reilly/Fox News people sifting the news to find things to attack with without researching them. emptywheel found something, but researched it thoroughly and tentatively concluded that the Administration was initially "data-mining" only international communications. She’s an honest person…
- My conclusion from all of this is that the N.S.A. is data-mining domestic communications. Data-mining means filtering everything to look for key phrases. The point is that it explains why they don’t want the courts involved. There is no "probable cause" in data-mining. We’re all under surveillance [all except maybe the Bush Administration]. They say they aren’t doing that. They are lying. Who knows? We might even agree to that with some kind of oversight on how that information is used. But, Bush and Cheney are too arrogant and paranoid to even ask us. All that matters to them is doing what they want to do…
So, here we go again. With the pre-war Iraq Intelligence, they lied. With the C.I.A. Leak case, they lied. With the U.S. Attorney Plan, they lied. With the N.S.A. Unwarranted Domestic Surveillance Program, they are lying. I think there’s a pattern here…
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