Day four in our five-part series on the most-overlooked stories of the FISA debate.
The NSA, phone companies and government are in deeper than we knew
In December, The New York Times ran a story about the administration and National Security Agency’s domestic spying partnerships with certain phone companies. The story elaborated on the "extensive but uneasy partnership" that exists between our government and the telecoms.
What it means
• The wiretapping and data collection program isn’t about defending us against future terrorist attacks – the program started in the ‘90s, long before 9/11 – and was ramped up by this administration immediately after taking office. It's routinely being used for run-of-the-mill drug cases to collect phone records that having nothing to do with terrorism.
• This program is not solely about collecting information from foreigners or international calls. The Times piece reveals that part of what made Qwest balk at the request in early 2001 was that the program was designed to pick up significant amounts of purely domestic communications by granting the NSA access "to their most localized communications switches, which primarily carry domestic calls" and that only "limited international traffic also passes through the switches." In fact, one anonymous engineer confirmed that creating the program to copy all the calls coming across one company's wires, "There was no discussion of limiting the monitoring to international communications."
• Phone companies apart from Qwest had reservations about the program. We know Qwest was approached long before 9/11 and refused to participate. Now we know that at least one more company had concerns about the legality of the program and "balked" in 2004. This undercuts the government's claims that everyone agreed the programs were legal.
• The story disputes government claims that there is no wholesale, dragnet collection of data: "the N.S.A. met with AT&T officials to discuss replicating a network center in Bedminster, N.J., to give the agency access to all the global phone and e-mail traffic that ran through it."
Why it matters
• The ties between the administration and telecommunications companies are perilously tangled and, with such a mutual and vested interest, the administration’s push for immunity is embarrassingly transparent. Claims that this debate is merely relevant to foreign intelligence and that the intelligence is for national security purposes only are wholly misleading.
• Sweeping telecom immunity is likely to shield the companies from liability for far more activities than we could have imagined. It seems the more we learn the less we know when it comes to our government’s surveillance of us. When it comes to granting immunity and denying citizens their day in court, the president’s say so cannot be the basis of a legal defense. When the Senate takes FISA up again later this month, it must make clear that Congress is not a mail order catalog but a co-equal branch of government.