NSA Had Domestic Call Monitoring Before 9/11? 479
MarkusQ writes "Bloomberg is reporting that, according to documents filed in the breach of privacy suit on behalf of Verizon and BellSouth, the NSA asked AT&T to set up its domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Could it be that they were intending to monitor domestic calls (and internet traffic) all along, and the 'Global War on Terror' was just a convenient excuse when they got caught?" From the article: "...an unnamed former employee of the AT&T unit provided them with evidence that the NSA approached the carrier with the proposed plan. Afran said he has seen the worker's log book and independently confirmed the source's participation in the project. He declined to identify the employee."
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
/. wiretap (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm also curious if the mainstream news media will pick this article and run with it. If for no other reason, I want to see the Daily Show and Colbert's take on it.
The word of the day? Pre-emptive strike.
No surprise here (Score:4, Interesting)
After all Echelon has been around much longer so this was only to be expected to happen.
The scary thing however is that it took so long to get out. Makes you wonder what else they have in hiding...
Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Conspiracy theory anyone? (Score:2, Interesting)
I just hope I get to live untill I'm 80 with my mind still intact, then I can see all the evidence from this bullshit as stuff is released in Britian and maybe even see some things from the US if a government with some balls and not just childish wargames in mind comes into power.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
The sad thing is that Bush can win points with the average Joe by pointing and saying, "Look, even my enemies are saying it! I tried to bring security to this country 7 months before 9/11 even happened but the NSA just didn't get the system up and running by then. Imagine only that it was and that the tragedy on 9/11 would have been averted."
BTW, I know that the FBI already had the evidence of something wrong by August 2001 but couldn't connect the dots. I think this whole phone tracing thing is just going to add a mountainous workload on top of thing and ain't going to predict diddly shit while we all have our rights infringed.
There just went a portion of Bush's legal defense (Score:5, Interesting)
Check FISA at Cornell University and you see statutes giving the President to use pen registers and trap and trace devices. If you didn't know, those things constitute the technology used to record numbers a phone has been dialing, and numbers that have called a phone. They also give the President the power to search and seize without a warrant and to use electronic surveillance without a warrant. Here is the exact statute. There are three identical sections with "electronic surveillance," "pen register or trap and trace device," and "search and seizure" being replaced by the other in each one.
Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the President, through the Attorney General, may authorize the use of a pen register or trap and trace device without a court order under this subchapter to acquire foreign intelligence information for a period not to exceed 15 calendar days following a declaration of war by Congress.
Even then, the statute may be interpreted many ways. "for a period not to exceed 15 calendar days" could mean that the authorization must be repeated every 15 days, that individual authorizations may last no longer than 15 days, that the power lasts 15 days once the President has used it, that the power may only be used for 15 days after Congress has declared war, or any number of interpretations, many more plausible than others.
It depends on to what extent your judicial interpretation philosophy incorporates "originalism," thinking about what Congress intended, "starre decisis," looking at prior court decisions, and "strict constructionism," which limits judicial interpretation to the meanings of the actual words and phrases used in law, and not on other sources or inferences.
There was a huge debate over whether the authorizations of military force constituted declarations of war for the reasons given above. The Democrats, they say, did not mean to give the President war powers and thought that the authorizations did not constitute declarations of war because they had been used as a means of allowing deployment of armed forces without giving the president war powers since at least the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which allowed an "escalation of military forces" in the Vietnam War. The Republicans mock them for this, and the debate was even brought up in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld if you watch the oral arguements on C-SPAN like I did.
For all this, how much has this of President Bush's arguements been brought up in the mainstream media? I have seen 2 paragraphs in an Associated Press article and nothing more. Regardless of the debate being all worthless now that he is discovered perhaps to have begun the program before 9/11, the debate is something I feel needs to be known. Just don't berate the Democrats for wanting to debate whether the Iraq War's a war. If the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution had been a declaration of war giving Richard Nixon wiretapping powers, the Supreme Court would not have ruled against him in East District of Michigan v. Nixon.
A statute in FISA does not make a difference in constitutional law. President Bush wants the statutes to make legal what he does with no regard to the Constitution, but when statutes prohibit his actions, he can cite constitutional authority. If it's legally a war, he'd say it's the first case, and if it's not he'd say it's the other.
This apparent legal paradox has arisen in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld---if he's a POW he's under the Geneva Convention, and if not he's a criminal entitled to a trial. The Bush administration argues he's not a POW because he was not fighting for an organized g
LoL. Can you people even remember last week? (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Carnivore first hit slashdot during the Clinton Administration. The oldest reference I found on slashdot is about Earthlink refusing to install it in 2000 [slashdot.org] - which means it had been in development for several years before that.
2. The legendary "Echelon" - the NSA program for monitoring all telecom traffic has been bandied about for many years - Slashdot posted several articles about it in May of 1999 [slashdot.org] but the news about it first broke in 1998. The program itself is probably 50 years old [heise.de].
Re:Illegal? (Score:5, Interesting)
Strictly speaking, President Bush was authorized by the Congress of the United States to invade Iraq, so it was not illegal under US law. Furthermore, a case can be made that, although hostilities were ceased, we were still effectively in a state of war. Iraq was still shooting at aircraft in the non-fly zone for example. If we presented evidence that Iraq had violated the terms under which hostilities ceased, then arguably the invasion was was legal under international law.
But...
If it turns out the "evidence" presented was faulty, or unreliable and the Bush administration knew it, then the legal basis for the war evaporates.
Re:/. wiretap (Score:1, Interesting)
Something else to think about, all government is evil: "Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer." Thomas Paine Common Sense [bartleby.com] If you have never read Common Sense before you should and imo you should reread it each and every time before you go vote. Every time I read it I wonder if those in Congress have ever read it because their votes would seem to make it apparent they never have or have failed to see the logic in it. Send your elected officials a copy, highlight the points that can get them your vote.
This post reminds me of another reason I post AC, there really isn't anything I can say that hasn't been said before and probably better. Any posters been sued for copyright infringement yet?
By the way, hey Taco, you gotten any National Security Letters handed to you yet? Oh, nvm, unPATRIOTic ACT. Maybe you can use an open
Amusingly: "please type the word in this image: rebels"
Re:Illegal? (Score:1, Interesting)
So anyway, this is all pointless in hindsight since Al Qaeda certainly DOES have ties in Iraq now and we are fighting terrorism there. The situation is going according to plan and terrorists are being drawn to Iraq like a moth is drawn to a flame. We also found a huge cache of WMD last month according to news reports. They were older weapons, but still deadly.
Re:Legal and Constitutional (Score:4, Interesting)
Advovates of expanded executive power like to talk about the President as "Commander in Chief", as if this were somehow a superior and broader function than the Presidency; and they like to talk about the President's "inherent powers". Some countries do have a system in which they elect dictators with practically unlimited powers, but not us.
The president's "inherent" powers are very few. It's a queer term in any case; no president I can think of ever used it before the present one, although Nixon did unsuccessfullly use the grounds of "Executive Privilege" to try to hide evidence of his wrongdoing in the Watergate affair. It would be more correct to describe most of the president's powers, not as "inherent" but "contingent". "Contingent Power" seems like a contradition in terms to some, but even the classic paradigm of power invested in the president can be seen as contingent: the power to take extraordinary actions while defending the country against invasion.
For example, the executive branch might comandeer property in the heat of battle. But it cannot raise taxes to support the defense. In both cases we're talking about siezing private property; the difference is that it's a practical impossibilty to vote on what goes on in battle, but a system of taxation necessarily inolves so much coordination that clearly Congress can be consulted.
And that's the rub. It's possible for the same action (siezing property in our example) to be constiutional or unconstitutional depending on specific circumstances. It also follows that by changing circumstances, we can change the scope of the president's "inherent" powers.
And thus, we have FISA.
Many of the things convered by FISA would fall into what we'd think of the president's "inherent" powers of defense. However, FISA does two things. First, it regulates the scope and manner in which the President exercises those powers. The president is not above the law; in the heat of battle he may stretch it or even break it with some excuse, but he certainly has no power to allocate funds to a program which flies in the face of it. Secondly, it provides mechanisms of accountability which are practical for the President to use in cases where it was impractical before. And this bears on the theory of "inherent powers". In cases where the President once could simply decide to intercept a private person's communications, he must now get a FISA warrant. The existence of the FISA mechanism, particularly the ability to get retroactive warrants, means it's no longer enough to brief congress in the time and manner you see fit. Nor is it in the power of the Congressional leadership to bless this as "legal" without changing the law.
Re:uh, what? (Score:1, Interesting)
First of all, there's no equivelalence between murder and any of "Suicide... car accidents... Heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, and smoking-related respitory diseases."
So if your argument is that we should be putting more resources behind those things, I'd have to disagree. First of all, most of those deaths are caused by lifestyles in which we are fully aware of the consequences. Sure, not everyone gets diabetes because they eat poorly, or cancer becasue they smoke - but when you weed out those that do, your numbers become significantly smaller.
Now, murder is definately an arguable case. The problem is that murder is generally done out of greed or jealously against one individual, and it doesn't have a large impact on the rest of the city, state, or country in which it took place. Anyone that argues that after 9/11, in which not just lives were lost but hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars were lost, impacting the entire country and, in fact, the entire world, either doesn't understand the consequences or is not being entirely honest.
The loss of life is secondary to the terrorist, whose primary goal is to strike "terror" into the hearts and minds of his victems, which aren't just the people he kills, but the entire nation (or religion, or whatever) that he's attacking. The attack isn't just meant to kill someone (like murder), but disrupt travel, destroy infrastructure...
I mean, come on! After Pearl Harbor would you have been arguing that the number of people killed didn't justify going to war (and all the expenses, including financial and human, that would cause) because the number of people killed was insignificant? Of course not!
And I also take issue with your statement that "'terrorism' (both domestic and Islamic) weren't a significant problem before 9-11 and they aren't a significant problem today, despite what the 6 o'clock news wants you to believe."
Michael Crichton's book "State of Fear" was about this very thing (despite all the global warming arguments, which I'm not going to debate here, the title of the book refers to the media's desire to keep the population in a state of fear in order to sell it's product). But terrorist was a problem (both domestic and international - especially international). I'd argue that a lot of people hurt in the first world trade center bombing would disagree with you, as well as people in Oklahoma City, who had relatives at the African Embassies or on the U.S. Cole...
Yes, the number of people killed pales in comparison to the number of people who die on our highways, but people are dying on our highways because they're being stupid drivers, while people who die from a terrorist attack were ostensibly doing nothing wrong... they were killed because of their religion or their nationality, or as collateral damage from the killings of people for their religious beliefs or nationality.
In other words, in all the things you listed (except murder), there was simple stupidity, bad luck, and poor lifestyle choices to blame. That's why it's not on people's radar anymore, it's just part of life. The only thing you listed that's comparable to terrorism is murder. Terrorism might be more rare (which is one reason why it's news), but the intentions and effects are a lot more destructive and insidious than murder.
Now, if it's possible, to bring this back on subject, I don't know if this is related to the domestic monitoring, where the record of calls are kept but not the content (which phone companies have always done anyway, and which many administrations have done, including Clinton), or the so-called "domestic wiretaps" where INTERNATIONAL calls to and from specific numbers were monitored. I'm not particularly happy about either one, but in neither case is it as bad as what the media have made it out to be.
Re:uh, what? (Score:2, Interesting)
Now, supposedly and hopefully, the ones still there will actually have some connection to the Taliban - Or not!
Re:Well it couldn't get any worse... (Score:3, Interesting)
As far as I can tell, despite being as execution-happy as we are, Bush isn't eligible for the death penalty under US law. Can the Hague pass down death sentences?
Re:Well it couldn't get any worse... (Score:3, Interesting)
Fascinating. You have a blanket label for anyone who thinks Bush is evil.
"X is a MIHOP person -> X starts from the presumption that Bush is evil" -/-> "X believes Bush is evil -> X is a MIHOP person."
As further evidenced by that hey!'s reply.
This almost isn't a logical fallacy because the clause "X believes Bush is evil" is made up out of whole cloth, existing only in your criticism and not appearing at all in what you criticized.
You're in no position to be making implicit accusations about the intelligence of Bush supporters.
And to point out what you really ought to already be able to tell, this post simply points out that your argument is bad; it implies nothing about my own beliefs. I actually put them here but it just complicated things, and besides, they are irrelevant to my point. Suffice it to say they are neither black nor white on this issue.
Re:Illegal? (Score:3, Interesting)
It is funny that you're saying that, given that Al Qaeda as an organization DOES NOT EXIST. I would recommend the eye opener The Power of Nightmares [wikipedia.org], a BBC documentary about the issue. I'd like to stress the importance that Al Qaeda never existed, it was made up by a guy escaping from Bin Laden because he stole his money, so while on the run the Feds stumbled upon him and the whole Al Qaeda name was born in 2001 January in a court in Massachussets. While there are terrorists (I'd rather to label them resistance movement inside Iraq), they a.) use the Al Qaeda name as a publicity tool b.) are fighting a national issue. International terrorism is extremely rare and negligible.
Of course (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course. This was created to satisfy the extension of traditional telephone wiretapping requirements. You remember Carnivore and the related laws, right? No large Internet provider can cost-effectively satisfy a wiretapping subpoena for -only- the data requested. That filtering requires equipment vastly more powerful than the routers they use. I looks to me like AT&T cut a deal: We'll give you access to the total data stream but in return you agree that filtering for the lawfully authorized data is solely and permanantly the Federal government's problem and expense.
From the perspective of fiscal responsibility to the shareholders, its the right choice.
Re:Illegal? (Score:4, Interesting)
Also end of international cooperation on economics, law enforcement and military matters.
What you say applies to individuals. Any individual who sets himself outside the law is able to act with perfect freedom. However he is not shielded from the actions of others. Certainly, we have police and courts and such. But this in the public sphere is just like having carpenters and plumbers. You could do the work yourself, but it's more efficient to hire specialists. In the end its the wrath of your neighbors you must consider, even if it administered through a professional police force instead of a mob. Likewise the lack of an international police force doesn't mean there is no international law; only that it is enforced with a kind of hysteresis. You can get away things for a while, because other nations still see greater benefit in cooperation than confrontation. But eventually the state flips to open hostility, and you're cooked. You can't get back by small measures either, you have to give back far more to restore a favorable equillibrium than ever you needed to maintain it.
There is one nation in the world which subscribes to your theory of international law: North Korea. They may "win" the current nuclear affair, but the victory would, in US or European eyes, be worse than almost any scenario we could imagine for defeat. They're still a failed, pariah state, sustaining itself by handouts grudgingly given because it's less trouble than crushing them. We could follow the same policies and end up moving in the same direction.
Mature and successful people don't manage their affairs by trowing tantrums and threatening to turn their back on everyone else whenever they don't get their way in every small detail. They work with others, giving up a little here and there and finding ways to get back more than they give up -- sometimes finding ways for everyone to get more than they give up. Dealing with other people is a process of creative compromise.
The same process, when applied to nations, is called by the adminsitration's conservative supporters "international government". Which goes to show there is such a thing as unintentional perspicacity.
When the European countries were world powers, they understood this...
And then times changed, and not only their world power status evaaporated, but the very assumptions by which they exercised powers as well.
Case in point. Our recent governemnts have pursued a policy of economic globalization. This was a case of the conservatives of an economic bent deceiving the conservatives of a nationalistic bent. Once you integrate your economy with the rest of the world, you strengthen the tendency towards world government tremendously. You can no more run your affairs idependently of what the rest of the world thinks and expects, than you could chop your own legs off.
We are locked with China now in a relationship of mutual economic interdependence. We can no longer pursue a foreign policy of "national self-interest" independent of this fact. Oh, you can still call it pursuing your "self-interest", but only in the sense that it is self-interest not to get into a fight with somebody you detest when you're both sitting in a small and unstable boat.
The music in the terms "national sovereignty" and "national self interest" comes with the assumed obligato of "national independence". Which now exists less than at any other point in history since the emergence of the nation state.
WHO does number TWO... WORK FOR?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps it's :
The Masons
Illuminati
Skulls & Bones
Trilateral Commission
Bilderberg Group
Neocons
Opus Dei (Heheh)
NSA
But seriously... who or what do people think Bush is working for and what evidence do they actually have?
Re:LoL. Can you people even remember last week? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Illegal? (Score:3, Interesting)
One is not assumed innocent until proven guilty
One is presumed innocent until proven guilty
It's more than just semantics, as the words have two very different meanings.
Assumed: Taken for granted; accepted as real or true without proof
Presumed: Taken for granted as being true in the absence of proof to the contrary
It's that "in the absence of proof to the contrary" bit that drives the police & the prosecution to do more than just make wild claims. They actually have to provide proof.
Also, that presumption of innocence is why a court will find you "not guilty" instead of "innocent." Just because the prosecutors can't prove you broke the law, doesn't mean a Judge can declare that you didn't. There is a seperate legal process involved in being declared "innocent" of a crime and you have to prove (with a preponderance of the evidence) that you are innocent.
There is no news here. (Score:3, Interesting)
My head spun at that moment. Apparently CNN didn't think it that odd that the NSA would have those records.
Re:Of course! (Score:4, Interesting)
The thing that is nuts, is that I want a revolution in this country, but just to put back the original constitution and the ways that this country was originally set up. It kills me that the people that set up our government 200+ years ago did it mostly right, but since WWII the federal government here has gotten completely (and unconstitutionally) out of hand.
Has there ever been a revolution that just reinstated what was already there? Or does it always start with a clean slate?
Re:Illegal? (Score:4, Interesting)
A similar thing happened with the assassination of JFK, MLK, RFK - denial and discrediting of facts that make people uncomfortable.
OR,
How did the 2000 'election' go unquestioned by the majority?
Why do the facts surrounding the unabomber attack not add up?
Why does the official story of 9/11 not make scientific or practical sense?
There are many other examples but I'm sure you get the idea.
The other day I heard a woman in the street being asked by her colleague if she wanted to read the newspaper he had. Her reply was "No thanks, I never read anything with bad news in it" and was proud of herself for her 'clever' approach. And I thought, "and that's why things are the way they are".
There's a passage in 1984 that explains how BB continued. It says 85% of the people didn't care or question - they were too busy with the sports games and the lottery. And, I think, that's where we're at now.
Re:Illegal? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is because their concept is 'durable, fast, many'. And it has proven to be the most effective for concept of war.
A Grumman f14 tomcat, in its abundant version, can track 12 enemies, and can direct 6 missiles to 6 of them at any given time.
However a grumman f14 tomcat is expensive and difficult to manufacture, operate, maintain. Any loss is a big loss. On the other hand, whatever is in russian hands is expendable, and replacable by around 10 in short time. this is what they did in ww2, this is what they were gonna do in ww3, and this is what they can do now.
As for electronics, simulations, battle tests, deployment en masse against technologically inferior enemies (iraq, vietnam) is one thing, meeting a foe in match is another.
The match of a-10 in russian air force can use anything from cologne to a multidude of petroleum distillates for fuel. It can fly with severe punishment.
And in the deployments against vietnam, afghanistan and iraq, we have seen that, even ragtag guerillas with negligible weapons can deal good damage to their foes. A galaxy was almost shot down in iraq. How many galaxies are there in strategic airlift command ? 12 ? How many awacs are there in sac ? What if russians spend 12 flankers apiece and get 10-15 existing awacs one by one ?
An analogy from history : germans had excellent technology, experience and perfect training to go with it, they favored extreme quality against quantity. Russians, favoring acceptable quality to go with enormous quantity had set them right. Same was the concept of u.s. in ww2, and this concept proved right. But from 45 to today, u.s. uk and west allies took to the mistake of germans "they have high numbers, we can match them in quality" - no you cant.
I guess it could be warrantless surveilance (Score:1, Interesting)
From the article:
The groundbreaker program is well known, in fact its infamous... in being a really really expensive network upgrade. The kind of thing with rewiring offices and buying lots of bandwidth from the likes of AT&T.
And I mean a lot of bandwidth. A lot of the DoD bandwidth contracts currently up for grabs are of course available online for anyone to see. [disa.mil] (But shame on the nytimes, shame shame shame!) How did you think intercepted traffic came from all over the world back (But especially big telco sites) to Maryland? Still wonder why companies like AT&T want to do everything to help the NSA?
And of course groundbreaker is over budget [baltimoresun.com] and insecure [baltimoresun.com].
So what is this secret new thing that is being claimed? The hints are:
It makes sense that the NSA would want a new but ordinairy "network operation center" with its new network. You really really need one of those to show politicians around [insecure.org] (scroll to "nsa loads nmap" for a good laugh). Especially the ones who know nothing about intelligence except what they have seen on 24 [fcw.com]. (I would be funny if there werent so many schools planes trains and subways blown up around the world after 9/11)
Guiding them past the movie theater and showing the huge list of languages in which movies are shown isn't glamorous, though it should get the point across of sigint being of no use without humans to read and hear it... It might also show why having computers that can display bidirectional text isn't some fancy feature nobody uses. (Its usefull for such obscure languages as say Arabic, just to name something random of the top of my head.) I guess the lack of lighting the 24 set designers came up with for dramatic effect makes these NOC places a little cheaper to run than hiring qualified analyst though.
Sure it could also be a top secret surveillance program advanced beyond anything ever seen before, possible including extra terrestrial technology and tinfoil hat countermeasures... I mean in theory you could call that a NOC I guess.
This possible hype reminds me of the echelon story. After unspecific press accounts surrounding a big and sloppy EU investigation about "echelon" people assumed the worse and the hype started to build and build.
Now some time has passed historians have been able to figure out [salon.com] exactly what component is codenamed echelon, and it looks a little like this [microsoft.com]. (Thats an 70`s VAX 11/780, for those who couldn't tell, shame on you)
Frontline Illuminates (Score:3, Interesting)
The Darkside http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/v iew/ [pbs.org]
Rumsfields War http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/pent agon/view/ [pbs.org]
War Behind Closed Doors http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/iraq /view/ [pbs.org]
Pretty much sums it up. These People saw Nixons spanking as a terrible stripping of presidential manhood, and set themselves about to "RESTORE" it. Complete with wiretaps and torture on demand. Dick and Don are in it for the long haul. I don't think they realize what lies at the end of the road they are building. (We would be lucky if it is another good ole fashioned presidential spanking. Can you impeach an entire cabinet?.)
They haven't changed much in the last 20 years. I expect them to act with the same lack of integrity and political chickanery they always have. This is your fathers Nixon administration.
The only good thing to come from any of this is Jon Stewart's Dead-On single syllable impressions. Waaaaunnnggh! Waaaaunnnggh! Heh,Heh,Heh!