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Sat 13 May, 2006 08:52 am
Three cheers for my phone company, Quest!---BBB
New York Times
May 13, 2006
Questions Raised for Phone Giants in Spy Data Furor
By JOHN MARKOFF
The former chief executive of Qwest, the nation's fourth-largest phone company, rebuffed government requests for the company's calling records after 9/11 because of "a disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process," his lawyer said yesterday.
The statement on behalf of the former Qwest executive, Joseph P. Nacchio, followed a report that the other big phone companies ?- AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon ?- had complied with an effort by the National Security Agency to build a vast database of calling records, without warrants, to increase its surveillance capabilities after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Those companies insisted yesterday that they were vigilant about their customers' privacy, but did not directly address their cooperation with the government effort, which was reported on Thursday by USA Today. Verizon said that it provided customer information to a government agency "only where authorized by law for appropriately defined and focused purposes," but that it could not comment on any relationship with a national security program that was "highly classified."
Legal experts said the companies faced the prospect of lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in damages over cooperation in the program, citing communications privacy legislation stretching back to the 1930's. A federal lawsuit was filed in Manhattan yesterday seeking as much as $50 billion in civil damages against Verizon on behalf of its subscribers.
For a second day, there was political fallout on Capitol Hill, where Senate Democrats intend to use next week's confirmation hearings for a new C.I.A. director to press the Bush administration on its broad surveillance programs.
As senior lawmakers in Washington vowed to examine the phone database operation and possibly issue subpoenas to the telephone companies, executives at some of the companies said they would comply with requests to appear on Capitol Hill but stopped short of describing how much would be disclosed, at least in public sessions.
"If Congress asks us to appear, we will appear," said Selim Bingol, a spokesman at AT&T. "We will act within the laws and rules that apply."
Qwest was apparently alone among the four major telephone companies to have resisted the requests to cooperate with the government effort. A statement issued on behalf of Mr. Nacchio yesterday by his lawyer, Herbert J. Stern, said that after the government's first approach in the fall of 2001, "Mr. Nacchio made inquiry as to whether a warrant or other legal process had been secured in support of that request."
"When he learned that no such authority had been granted, and that there was a disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process," Mr. Nacchio concluded that the requests violated federal privacy requirements "and issued instructions to refuse to comply."
The statement said the requests continued until Mr. Nacchio left in June 2002. His departure came amid accusations of fraud at the company, and he now faces federal charges of insider trading.
The database reportedly assembled by the security agency from calling records has dozens of fields of information, including called and calling numbers and the duration of calls, but nothing related to the substance of the calls. But it could permit what intelligence analysts and commercial data miners refer to as "link analysis," a statistical technique for investigators to identify calling patterns in a seemingly impenetrable mountain of digital data.
The law governing the release of phone company data has been modified repeatedly to grapple with changing computer and communications technologies that have increasingly bedeviled law enforcement agencies. The laws include the Communications Act, first passed in 1934, and a variety of provisions of the Electronic Communications and Privacy Act, including the Stored Communications Act, passed in 1986.
Wiretapping ?- actually listening to phone calls ?- has been tightly regulated by these laws. But in general, the laws have set a lower legal standard required by the government to obtain what has traditionally been called pen register or trap-and-trace information ?- calling records obtained when intelligence and police agencies attached a specialized device to subscribers' telephone lines.
Those restrictions still hold, said a range of legal scholars, in the face of new computer databases with decades' worth of calling records. AT&T created such technology during the 1990's for use in fraud detection and has previously made such information available to law enforcement with proper warrants.
Orin Kerr, a former federal prosecutor and assistant professor at George Washington University, said his reading of the relevant statutes put the phone companies at risk for at least $1,000 per person whose records they disclosed without a court order.
"This is not a happy day for the general counsels" of the phone companies, he said. "If you have a class action involving 10 million Americans, that's 10 million times $1,000 ?- that's 10 billion."
The New Jersey lawyers who filed the federal suit against Verizon in Manhattan yesterday, Bruce Afran and Carl Mayer, said they would consider filing suits against BellSouth and AT&T in other jurisdictions.
"This is almost certainly the largest single intrusion into American civil liberties ever committed by any U.S. administration," Mr. Afran said. "Americans expect their phone records to be private. That's our bedrock governing principle of our phone system." In addition to damages, the suit seeks an injunction against the security agency to stop the collection of phone numbers.
Several legal experts cited ambiguities in the laws that may be used by the government and the phone companies to defend the National Security Agency program.
"There's a loophole," said Mark Rasch, the former head of computer-crime investigations for the Justice Department and now the senior vice president of Solutionary, a computer security company. "Records of phones that have called each other without identifying information are not covered by any of these laws."
Civil liberties lawyers were quick to dispute that claim.
"This is an incredible red herring," said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy rights group that has sued AT&T over its cooperation with the government, including access to calling records. "There is no legal process that contemplates getting entire databases of data."
The group sued AT&T in late January, contending that the company was violating the law by giving the government access to its customer call record data and permitting the agency to tap its Internet network. The suit followed reports in The New York Times in December that telecommunications companies had cooperated with such government requests without warrants.
A number of industry executives pointed to the national climate in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks to explain why phone companies might have risked legal entanglement in cooperating with the requests for data without warrants.
An AT&T spokesman said yesterday that the company had gotten some calls and e-mail messages about the news reports, but characterized the volume as "not heavy" and said there were responses on both sides of the issue.
Reaction around the country also appeared to be divided.
Cathy Reed, 45, a wealth manager from Austin, Tex., who was visiting Boston, said she did not see a problem with the government's reviewing call logs. "I really don't think it matters," she said. "I bet every credit card company already has them."
Others responded critically. Pat Randall, 63, a receptionist at an Atlanta high-rise, said, "Our phone conversations are just personal, and to me, the phone companies that cooperated, I think we should move our phone services to the company that did not cooperate."
While the telephone companies have both business contracts and regulatory issues before the federal government, executives in the industry yesterday dismissed the notion that they felt pressure to take part in any surveillance programs. The small group of executives with the security clearance necessary to deal with the government on such matters, they said, are separate from the regulatory and government contracting divisions of the companies.
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Reporting for this article was contributed by Ken Belson, Brenda Goodman, Stephen Labaton, Matt Richteland Katie Zezima.
Several polls indicate that many people are not that concerned by the NSA's program. I was more than just surprised about this, since in my homecountry similar would lead to a big government crisis. At least.
Government has long history of abusing personal information
Posted on Fri, May. 12, 2006
Government has long history of abusing personal information
By Ron Hutcheson
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - President Bush has assured Americans that their government isn't spying on them, but history explains why many remain uneasy about this week's news that their phone records have been turned over to federal agents.
The government has a long track record of abusing personal information that's gathered in the name of national security. From the Red Scare in the 1920s to illegal wiretaps during the Nixon era, Americans have struggled to find the right balance between individual rights and collective security.
"The potential for abuse is awesome," a Senate investigation committee concluded in a 1976 report detailing illegal wiretaps, break-ins and other abuses that government agents committed in the 1960s and `70s.
The Senate panel, known as the "Church committee" after its chairman, Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, warned that technological advances would make it even harder for the government to stay within acceptable limits of respecting privacy rights, especially when the nation is at risk of attack.
"In time of crisis, the government will exercise its power to conduct domestic intelligence activities to the fullest extent. The distinction between legal dissent and criminal conduct is easily forgotten," the committee wrote. "In an era where the technological capability of government relentlessly increases, we must be wary about the drift toward `big brother government.'''
The government has been collecting and storing information on its citizens since at least 1912, when the Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner to the FBI, recruited waiters, socialites and other well-placed individuals to eavesdrop on conversations and report any suspicious talk.
By the Red Scare in the 1920s, when the government made large-scale arrests of radicals and leftists in the wake of communists taking power in Russia, the bureau had assembled a rapidly expanding database of more than 150,000 names.
Abuses over the years cross party lines and political ideologies. Franklin Roosevelt wanted a file on Americans who sent him critical telegrams. Lyndon Johnson asked the FBI to get him the phone records of Republican vice presidential candidate Spiro Agnew.
Attorney General Robert Kennedy, remembered today as a champion of the underdog, approved wiretaps on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Nearly every recent president has ordered questionable "name checks" - a search of FBI files for any damaging information - on political opponents.
During the Nixon administration, a name check on journalist Daniel Schorr backfired when the FBI misunderstood its instructions and conducted a full background investigation, including interviews with Schorr's associates. White House officials, desperate for a cover story to explain the FBI probe, made the improbable claim that Schorr had been under consideration for a government appointment.
The Church committee concluded that few politicians can resist the chance to gather information on their enemies, and few intelligence-gatherers can resist pressure to please the president. There has been no evidence so far that any phone records the government has collected recently in its search for terrorists have been misused, but that's small comfort to civil libertarians.
"It's about human failings, human failings amplified by technology," said Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group. "Men are not angels. Our Constitution was written by people who understood that human nature has many flaws."
In some cases, intelligence-gatherers try to use the information they collect against their enemies. In one of the most notorious examples, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover launched a campaign to discredit King that included an attempt to get him to commit suicide.
After gathering evidence of King's extramarital affairs, the agency sent a compilation of incriminating audiotapes to King's wife and sent him a note suggesting that he take his own life.
"King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. ... You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation," the note said.
Bush's defenders say the current controversy bears no resemblance to past abuses and is being blown out of proportion.
"Let's talk about this in a rational way. We're in a war with terror and there are people out there that want to kill us," said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. "I don't think this action is nearly as troublesome as it's being made out. They're not tapping our phones and getting our conversations."
The government is using the phone records for data mining, the process of searching through a large volume of information to find useful patterns, in this case, evidence of terrorist communications.
"The problem isn't data mining. It's the people who do it," said Daniel Larose, a statistics professor at Central Connecticut State University and the author of "Data Mining Methods and Models." "It's easy to do badly. Humans tend to see patterns where no patterns exist. They might classify someone as suspicious who doesn't deserve suspicion."
Larose, who has written two other books on the subject, said data mining was like a knife. "You can use it to cut your birthday cake," he said. Or "you can use it to murder somebody in an alley."
BBB, i've noticed that cell phone records are not specifically mentioned, although AT&T & Verizon have cellular networks. does this mean that the goverment didn't request cell phone records?
It could be the way the questions were worded.
Quote:A Washington Post/ABC News poll on the National Security Agency (NSA) program to collect phone call records of tens of millions of United States residents -- conducted on May 11, the same day the program was first publicly disclosed -- asked respondents: "It's been reported that the National Security Agency has been collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans. It then analyzes calling patterns in an effort to identify possible terrorism suspects, without listening to or recording the conversations. Would you consider this an acceptable or unacceptable way for the federal government to investigate terrorism? Do you feel that way strongly or somewhat?" According to the poll, 63 percent of respondents found the program acceptable.
However, the poll question affirmatively claimed that the NSA is not "listening to or recording the conversations" captured by the data collection program. This statement suggests -- falsely, according to the Post itself -- that the data collection program is separate from the NSA's warrantless domestic eavesdropping program, first publicly revealed by The New York Times in December 2005. In fact, according to a May 12 Post article, the two programs are directly linked: "Government access to call records is related to the previously disclosed eavesdropping program, sources said, because it helps the NSA choose its targets for listening. The mathematical techniques known as 'link analysis' and 'pattern analysis,' they said, give grounds for suspicion that can result in further investigation." In other words, according to The Washington Post itself -- and contrary to the poll question -- the NSA might well be "listening to or recording the conversations" of at least some Americans as a direct result of its analysis of the phone record data the NSA is collecting.
Moreover, as Media Matters for America has noted, the Post reported on February 5 that according to "current and former government officials and private-sector sources," intelligence officers used the program to eavesdrop "on thousands of Americans in overseas calls" but "dismissed nearly all of them as potential suspects after hearing nothing pertinent to a terrorist threat."
Both the Post and ABC News posted the results of the poll online (here and here, respectively). A May 12 ABC News online article on the poll reported that it lends "support to the administration's defense of its anti-terrorism intelligence efforts," and the May 12 edition of ABC News' online political newsletter, The Note, proclaimed:
Senators [Arlen] Specter [R-PA] and [Olympia] Snowe [R-ME], Sunday morning pundits, reporters from the Nation's Newspaper and the nation's newspapers, and all MOCs [members of Congress] with "(D)"s after their names want to know more about the domestic telephone record harvesting that the Bush Administration apparently has engaged in.
The American people and [White House press secretary] Tony Snow, however, just might know as much as they want to know about it.
On the May 12 edition of MSNBC News Live, Washington Post polling director Richard Morin, when asked to compare the results of this poll to polling conducted in December 2005 on the domestic surveillance program, responded:
MORIN: Actually, these are a little more positive in favor of the program than the survey we first did on the NSA eavesdropping investigation. Americans seem to be more willing to accept this because it doesn't involve people reading their e-mails or listening in to their telephone calls. Just collecting their phone records.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200605120005
But even if they do support it, it don't make it right. We have laws in this country regarding our privacy and the president is going around them which isn't right. We shouldn't have to just trust the government is not going to abuse our rights.
For what its worth; an update on a poll of what Americans think of the NSA spying.
Quote:May 13, 2006 - Has the Bush administration gone too far in expanding the powers of the President to fight terrorism? Yes, say a majority of Americans, following this week's revelation that the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone records of U.S. citizens since the September 11 terrorist attacks. According to the latest NEWSWEEK poll, 53 percent of Americans think the NSA's surveillance program "goes too far in invading people's privacy," while 41 percent see it as a necessary tool to combat terrorism.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12771821/site/newsweek/
I hope this stays on top of the news for many more months, because it will bring down Bush's performance rating further south. Nothing could be better right now; the worst president in US history ended with a approval rating of 9 percent - all fundamentalist christians/neocons.
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