Everyone assumes that the telecommunications giants joined the Bush Administrations warrantless wiretapping program with the Administration's promise that if the president said it was lawful, than they were covered. Excuse me, but I just find that a little hard to swallow. These companies were not newly minted start ups with zero inter agency savvy. These were companies who have been providing the means to wiretaps for decades (in one form or another (before the breakup as AT&T, after the breakup as their respective companies)).
Could there have been more to the history of the program than what the MSM has reported on? I think there is. Follow me below the fold and I'll try to explain.
As we all know, the Administrations wiretapping program has been in existence since shortly after the attacks of September 11th. Everyone seems to believe that all the Administration had to do to get the telecommunications companies to go along was to promise them that the program was legal because the President said so. We heard nary a peep at the time from the telecoms, even though most of them have fleets of lawyers.
I have two suggested reasons why they might have been so quiet.
- Right around the time the program was put in place, the GSA started the information gathering process on what was to become the largest outsource telecommunications contract the country had ever seen (Networx). It was a 10-year government-wide contract valued at more than $68 billion. All of the major telecoms participated and were awarded one piece or another.
That is a pretty good size carrot to dangle in front of any company. Who can say whether or not pressure (in the form of withheld business) was put on the telecoms. Especially when you had Bush appointed administrators in charge of GSA.
- Is noone alarmed at the speed at which the antitrust vetting process was carried out as it relates to the flurry of telecom mergers over the past 7 years? AT&T, I believe, is now 70 percent reformulated (AT&T now encompassed 70% of the companies that it was broken into). It would not be very hard to put pressure on a business when your appointees control the outcome of a particular business action and you are in a highly regulated business.
I am not trying to defend the telcoms. They should have told the Administration to come back with a warrant. I can though, see this particular administration using all the levers (Justice review of mergers, GSA control of the contract process, etc) at its disposal to more than gently nudge the telecoms to go along and keep them going along.
Congress, Please put the current FISA bill on hold and look a little deeper. There's more stuff hiding under the rocks.
Some background information:
The FTS2001 GSA telecom contract was originated in 1996. The first major contracts were signed in 1998 and would run through 2006. AT&T did not win a piece of the FTS2001 contract (MCI and Sprint were the big winners).
With MCI imploding in 2000/2001 there's a good chance that GSA had already started thinking about their next contract that would become Networx
UPDATE:Sent this diary to my Representive (Brad Miller).
Could someone send this along to at least a few Senators, mine are Dole and Burr. I doubt very much that they would even read the email.