[Mb-civic] MUST READ: The spy who bills us - Patrick Radden Keefe - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  The spy who bills us

By Patrick Radden Keefe  |  February 23, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

WHEN YOUR phone bill arrives this month, you might want to take a moment 
to think about how much you trust your telephone company. While the 
National Security Agency has gotten a lot of press since it was revealed 
in December that its analysts engaged in the warrantless surveillance of 
US citizens, the eavesdropping agency would not have been able to 
conduct the operation without the intimate -- and likely illegal -- 
cooperation of private telecommunications providers.

After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the NSA adopted a bold 
new approach. Seeking more unfettered access to the vast communications 
channels that run through the country, the agency approached executives 
at major telecommunications companies and requested that they provide 
the NSA with secret backdoors into the hubs and switches through which 
our telephone calls and e-mails are routed. Whereas the Foreign 
Intelligence Surveillance Act requires spies to obtain individual 
warrants for each target in an investigation, the phone companies 
provided unfiltered access to the full current of communications -- not 
just Al Qaeda's calls, but everyone else's as well.

One problem with this approach is that it's like drinking from a fire 
hose. The NSA intercepts about 650 million communications worldwide 
every day, and, in something of a paradox, the better the agency is at 
hoovering in phone calls and e-mails, the worse it is at isolating 
critical and timely information from the white noise. According to 
recent reports, few of the tips the agency generated from its 
wiretapping program resulted in the identification of actual terrorists 
or plots.

Another problem is that trolling indiscriminately through the 
communications stream is illegal. The mechanism for eavesdropping 
established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is simple: 
Target first, eavesdrop second. If there are grounds to suspect that a 
person is a terrorist or agent of a foreign power, a warrant is granted 
to spy on that person. With this new program, the agency has inverted 
the traditional steps: Eavesdrop first, then identify targets within the 
stream of intercepted communications.

Thus far, administration officials have successfully resisted efforts by 
Congress to address the probable inefficiency and definite illegality of 
this procedure, but in outsourcing the logistics of the operation to 
private telecommunications companies, they may have made a crucial 
error. Employees of the president might argue that ''executive 
privilege" frees them from responding to congressional inquiries about 
sensitive national security operations, but the CEOs of the telecom 
companies have no such easy out. Earlier this month, USA Today reported 
that AT&T, MCI, and Sprint are three of the companies that secretly 
cooperate with the NSA. Democratic Senators Edward M. Kennedy of 
Massachusetts and Russell Feingold of Wisconsin have written to the 
companies, asking about their involvement in the program, and if the 
Bush administration continues to resist congressional inquiries, the 
senators could subpoena executives of the companies and oblige them to 
explain their involvement.

Times of national crisis grant a certain license to the executive 
branch, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has argued, in effect, 
that as long as officials are endeavoring to keep the country safe, they 
need not answer questions about the particular means they employ to do 
so. Private companies have no such license, and AT&T, MCI, and Sprint 
should not be able to hide from the senators or from their own 
customers. If it is determined -- as it probably will be -- that the 
wiretapping program was illegal, then the telecom companies are guilty 
of violating federal law. In the meantime, it's clear that they have 
violated their own customer privacy policies. You might want to take 
another look at yours.

Patrick Radden Keefe, a fellow at the Century Foundation, is author of 
''Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping." 

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/02/23/the_spy_who_bills_us/
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