Telcos Deny NSA Ties — And Allowed to Lie?

Verizon and BellSouth are deny­ing the charges, that they’ve helped out the NSA. AT&T, on the other hand, finds itself back in court this morn­ing, over its alleged coop­er­a­tion with the spooks. The issue: Company whistle­blower Mark Klein’s notes about the 24-​​by-​​48 feet “secret room… [that] only peo­ple with secu­rity clear­ance from the National Security Agency can enter.“
Ryan Singel, as usual, has the scoop.
Meanwhile, Eric Umansky sees some “exquis­itely crafted spin going on.”

As the NYT puts it, a “senior gov­ern­ment offi­cial con­firmed” that the NSA has “access to records of most tele­phone calls in the United States.” The Times hints at a pos­si­ble expla­na­tion for the dis­crep­ancy: The spooks are track­ing only long-​​distance calls, and Verizon and BellSouth hand those calls off to other providers, such as, say, AT&T, which is the one com­pany named that has stayed mum.

Sounds pos­si­ble. But that BellSouth denial, at least, was about as unequiv­o­cal as you could imag­ine: “We have pro­vided no cus­tomer infor­ma­tion what­so­ever to the NSA.“
UPDATE 11:38 AM: This William Arkin post is well worth a read:

I spoke to a friend in the busi­ness yes­ter­day, a retired mil­i­tary intel­li­gence offi­cer who works at some belt­way cor­po­ra­tion that con­tracts big time with NSA.
He cau­tions that I shouldn’t get ahead of them­selves wor­ry­ing about an all-​​seeing gov­ern­ment and a seam­less sur­veil­lance cul­ture. Billions are being secretly spent annu­ally for soft­ware devel­op­ment, net­work infra­struc­ture, data­base man­age­ment, etc., to build a dreamed for sys­tem that will be able to autonomously con­nect the dots and detect ter­ror­ists before they strike. But a seam­less sys­tem, my always reli­able and level headed friend assures, is still far away.
So that got me think­ing: a fan­tas­tic sys­tem cost­ing bil­lions of dol­lars rop­ing in scores of com­pa­nies butting up against ortho­doxy and even legal­ity with the dreamed for end result of autonomous and per­fect defense.
Data min­ing is the Bush administration’s Star Wars.

UPDATE 12:18 PM: Back at Wired News, there’s a look at “The Ultimate Net Monitoring Tool” — Narus’ Semantic Traffic Analyzer installed at AT&T, allegedly at the NSA’s behest.
UPDATE 3:17 PM: Eric has dug up another plau­si­ble expla­na­tion for the tel­cos’ denials: they out­source all the data-​​mineable info to Israel. He pulls up this Fox News tran­script as evidence:

BellSouth sub­con­tracts with an Israeli com­pany known as Amdocs to han­dle its billing, as do sev­eral other U.S. phone com­pa­nies. In 2001, U.S. intel­li­gence offi­cials were on record as say­ing that the infor­ma­tion that Amdocs han­dled was so valu­able that a great deal could be learned if sophis­ti­cated data-​​mining tech­niques were used against that information.

UPDATE 3:20 PM: Oh, this is rich. “Ordinarily, a com­pany that con­ceals their trans­ac­tions and activ­i­ties from the pub­lic would vio­late secu­ri­ties law,” ThinkProgess notes. “But an pres­i­den­tial mem­o­ran­dum signed by the President on May 5 allows the Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, to autho­rize a com­pany to con­ceal activ­i­ties related to national secu­rity. (See 15 U.S.C. 78m(b)(3)(A))”

There is no evi­dence that this exec­u­tive order has been used by John Negroponte with respect to the tel­cos. Of course, if it was used, we wouldnt know about it.

(Big ups: TP)

May 17th, 2006 | You can run... | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.