Telecom Amnesty would forever foreclose investigation of vital issues

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: dewayne () warpspeed com (Dewayne Hendricks)
Date: October 16, 2007 12:05:58 AM EDT
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <xyzzy () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Telecom Amnesty would forever foreclose  
investigation of vital issues

[Note:  This item comes from reader Robert Berger.  DLH]

From: "Robert J. Berger" <rberger () ibd com>
Date: October 15, 2007 1:46:26 PM PDT
To: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>, David Farber  
<dave () farber net>
Subject: Telecom Amnesty would forever foreclose investigation of  
vital issues

MONDAY OCTOBER 15, 2007 09:45 EST
Telecom Amnesty would forever foreclose investigation of vital issues

<http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/10/15/amnesty/index.html>

The documents that were released as part of the criminal prosecution  
of Joseph Nacchio, the former Qwest CEO who refused to participate in  
what he believed to be illegal government surveillance programs (and  
was then prosecuted for insider trading by the Bush administration),  
are revealing in numerous important respects.

Nacchio -- who was convicted earlier this year of insider trading for  
selling his Qwest shares with insider knowledge that the company was  
about to lose substantial value -- is attempting to prove that, at  
the time he sold his shares, he anticipated that Qwest would receive  
highly lucrative government contracts (for surveillance and other  
programs) that were being negotiated almost immediately upon Bush's  
inauguration in 2001 -- months before the 9/11 attacks (the bulk of  
those projects was ultimately awarded to AT&T, Verizon and others).

To prove that, Nacchio has submitted voluminous (and heavily  
redacted) documentation (.pdf) detailing the vast number of projects  
which the Bush administration (and, to a lesser extent, the Clinton  
administration) was pursuing in joint cooperation with the telecom  
industry. Those documents were released last week, and there are two  
critical points that become crystal clear from reviewing them:

(1) The cooperation between the various military/intelligence  
branches of the Federal Government -- particularly the Pentagon and  
the NSA -- and the private telecommunications corporations is  
extraordinary and endless. They really are, in every respect,  
virtually indistinguishable. The Federal Government has its hands dug  
deeply into the entire ostensibly "private" telecommunications  
infrastructure and, in return, the nation's telecoms are recipients  
of enormous amounts of revenues by virtue of turning themselves into  
branches of the Federal Government.

There simply is no separation between these corporations and the  
military and intelligence agencies of the Federal Government. They  
meet and plan and agree so frequently, and at such high levels, that  
they practically form a consortium. Just in Nacchio's limited and  
redacted disclosures, there are descriptions of numerous pre-9/11  
meetings between the largest telecoms and multiple Bush national  
security officials, including Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, NSA  
Director Gen. Michael Hayden and counter-terrorism advisor Richard  
Clarke.

The top telecom officials are devoting substantial amounts of their  
energy to working on highly classified telecom projects with the Bush  
administration, including projects to develop whole new joint  
networks and ensure unfettered governmental access to those networks.  
Before joining the administration as its Director of National  
Intelligence, Mike McConnell spearheaded the efforts on behalf of  
telecoms to massively increase the cooperation between the Federal  
Government and the telecom industry.

The private/public distinction here has eroded almost completely.  
There is no governmental oversight or regulation of these companies.  
Quite the contrary, they work in secret and in tandem -- as one  
consortium -- with no oversight at all.

And contrary to the indescribably moronic claim by Fred Hiatt  
yesterday that telecoms were acting as "patriotic corporate citizens"  
when they turned over to the Bush administration full access to their  
customers's calls and other data, the Nacchio documents leave no  
doubt that these telecoms were viciously competing with one another  
for the right to cooperate with the Federal Government -- long before  
9/11 -- because they were hungry for the multi-billion dollar  
contracts for this work.

There is obviously nothing inherently wrong with corporations  
competing for lucrative government contracts. But the work they were  
to perform here -- in providing unfettered data and other information  
regarding the communications of Americans -- was illegal under  
multiple federal laws enacted precisely to prohibit telecoms from  
providing access without warrants to the data and content of their  
customers's calls.

<snip>

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