USA Today reports on a massive NSA database of every single phone call made in the United States, compiled with the help of the three largest telecom companies.
The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.
The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans - most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.
"It's the largest database ever assembled in the world," said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA's activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency's goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders, this person added.
I can hear the refrain from conservatives already: they're only after terrorists, not you. If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear, so what's the big deal? A little history lesson is probably in order to dispell those assurances. I don't trust any government with that kind of access to information, including ours. They have already proven, over many decades, not to be trustworthy when they have access to information that could prove damaging to their political enemies.
Remember, this is the same government that illegal tapped the phones of peaceful civil rights groups, including Martin Luther King, and used the personally embarrassing - but not illegal - things they learned that way to blackmail them. Do you think George Bush would hesitate to use, for example, the fact that a political opponent made calls to a phone sex line to destroy a political enemy or to coerce a vote on an item on his agenda? Do you think Bill Clinton would have hesitated for a moment to do so?
This is the same government that infiltrates and spies on anti-war groups, even undeniably peaceful groups like the Quakers. It's the same government that tries like hell to keep the truth from us on everything from the Pentagon Papers to the Iran-Contra scandal to the existence of secret prisons. I don't care what party is in charge of the government, no government can be trusted to spy on its people without safeguards and not use that information against innocent people.
Oh, by the way, the one major phone company that refused to turn over its records to the NSA was Qwest:
According to sources familiar with the events, Qwest's CEO at the time, Joe Nacchio, was deeply troubled by the NSA's assertion that Qwest didn't need a court order -- or approval under FISA -- to proceed. Adding to the tension, Qwest was unclear about who, exactly, would have access to its customers' information and how that information might be used.
Financial implications were also a concern, the sources said. Carriers that illegally divulge calling information can be subjected to heavy fines. The NSA was asking Qwest to turn over millions of records. The fines, in the aggregate, could have been substantial.
The NSA told Qwest that other government agencies, including the FBI, CIA and DEA, also might have access to the database, the sources said. As a matter of practice, the NSA regularly shares its information -- known as "product" in intelligence circles -- with other intelligence groups. Even so, Qwest's lawyers were troubled by the expansiveness of the NSA request, the sources said.
The NSA, which needed Qwest's participation to completely cover the country, pushed back hard.
Trying to put pressure on Qwest, NSA representatives pointedly told Qwest that it was the lone holdout among the big telecommunications companies. It also tried appealing to Qwest's patriotic side: In one meeting, an NSA representative suggested that Qwest's refusal to contribute to the database could compromise national security, one person recalled.
In addition, the agency suggested that Qwest's foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government. Like other big telecommunications companies, Qwest already had classified contracts and hoped to get more.
Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest's lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.
The NSA's explanation did little to satisfy Qwest's lawyers. "They told (Qwest) they didn't want to do that because FISA might not agree with them," one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest's suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general's office. A second person confirmed this version of events.
I think it's time to look into whether Qwest operates in this area. If they do, I'm changing phone companies. And isn't it fascinating that they told Qwest that they wouldn't go to the FISA court because they thought the court would say no. Just another example of the Bush administration sidestepping checks and safeguards that protect our constitutional rights in order to get what they want. The law? What's that. The Fuhrer President decides what's legal and what's not.
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"This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. "
They forgot to finish that sentence by including the word "yet".
This program might, in fact, not be the same one that we now know as the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program, but I strongly suspect that they have at least one quality in common: they involve every phone call that can be tapped. That is the only reason I can think of for the Bush administration to not get warrants for their urgent taps, since the law allows them to tap first and then ask later. How could they ask for warrants for every caller in the US?
I also doubt the competence of the government to reliably identify the patterns they are looking for.
"This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations."
...at least that's the story we're putting out.
This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations.
Yeah, right, they're recording every phone call ever made with NO INTENT WHATSOEVER to actually listen to them.
The loony right are so firmly entrenched in the US that they no longer need to make up plausible lies.
Gah! How do I keep myself from utter despair? Does the constitution have no meaning, at all, anymore?
Qwest provides local phone service (through its assets that were formerly U.S. West, which were formerly Mountain Bell) in the fourteen states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico.
BTW, many regions have competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) which provide service using the last-mile access lines of the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) or other incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC). If plain old telephone service worked like Internet, purchasing your local phone service from a CLEC would prevent the ILEC from collecting CDR records for your calls unless they actually intercepted data on the access circuit. But, unfortunately, old-fashioned telephony involves the CDRs being generated/collected by the ILEC and distributed to the CLEC.
VOIP makes things much, much more difficult for this kind of data collection.
I'm a Qwest customer, generally happy with service, happier to know they're not goverment patsies. They are quite familiar with the sting of government fines--Qwest has to send out an annual statement detailing what percentage of its service calls are answered on time, and a raft of other statistics, all because of penalties for crappy telephony in the past.
(Those who are super-interested in how Qwest has to deal differently in the 13 states of its operation might want to check out its legal "RESALE AGREEMENT" [doc].)
I'm pretty sure they're not recording conversations because my god how the heck could you begin to try and store that.
My basic opinion on this is yet they are doing this for the purpose of finding patterns in terrorist communcations and yes they probably will, while they have it, take a peep at who their political opponents are calling.
Wow! Computer technology that can analyze databases of phone calls and detect criminal activity! I wonder if there's any way that it could be used to detect -- assuming such a problem existed -- corrupt politicans and lobbyists. I'm sure if Jorge could do that he would.
Is this not just an extension of the Echelon project? I understand that the NSA already copy huge amounts of internet traffic and phone calls (mobile as well as landline)already.
Good to hear that Qwest stuck to their guns. While I'm not happy that my phone company, Verizon rolled, I wonder how much prodding from the NSA each of the companies that did roll took before succumbing. I'd change to Qwest if I could.
Well, as long as Bush keeps his penis inside his pants, he must not be doing anything bad.
Why is there not more outrage at this clear evidence of criminal activity on the part of the currrent administration? I do not understand the hesitation by Congress to start impeachment proceedings immediately!
Last night Bill O'Reilly had someone on who objected to this database. She didn't get much chance to talk as O'Reilly kept interrupting her with "I said, let's keep this in reality and none of your hypothetical, left-wing stuff." He went on to complain that we'd never catch the terrorists if there were any legal restrictions on the War On Terror.
She gave several examples as above of gov't misuse of telecom information and O'Reilly said; "OK, you just don't trust the government, I get that. But in a time of Terror, we need to." And with that the segment was over.
What I don't understand is how a domestic database such as this, only consisting of phone numbers linked to other phone numbers, be used to predict terrorist activity? An anomalously high number of terrorist-associated phone calls, which would still be a miniscule component of phone calls in even a small city, would be completely lost in the background noise. Wouldn't this database be worthless without the names of the people attached to the phone records?
Which leads me to my next point. As suggested above, they probably wouldn't be doing this if they didn't have a way to extract additional information out of these phone calls.
Troy Britain wrote:
"'This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations.'
...at least that's the story we're putting out."
No, this is a common Bush technique. *This* program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. That's true--*this* program involves collection of call-detail records. It's *another* program that involves the NSA listening to or recording conversations--the one that involves using Narus boxes on AT&T's network for traffic interception, for example, that came out already in the EFF lawsuit against AT&T. (Now, it's actually possible that they are just collecting Internet flow data with that, which would be the Internet near-equivalent of CDRs, being the source and destination addresses and ports of traffic flows, rather than the content.)
Sorry folks, but you're simply not interesting enough to eavesdrop on.