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.
I can hear the eavesdropping apologists now: “What do you have to worry about unless you’re doing something wrong?”
Big Brother, motherfuckers. That’s what I have to worry about. That and Gilead. The slicing, dicing and julienning of the Constitution. The fact that my cell phone provider, Verizon (and oh, how I resisted subscribing to their service, but the fact is that they have one of the best networks in the City, and I was tired of the dead spots and dropped calls I was getting with Sprint) is in on this just makes it worse. I am not paying them a monthly fee to have them turn over my personal information to the government without my knowledge so that they can “analyze patterns.”
The content of my phone conversations is, I am sure, profoundly dull to eavesdroppers. But that doesn’t change the fact that the government is spying on its own citizens without warrants and the big telcos are helping them. And the scope of the spying is vast:
“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.
For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made — across town or across the country — to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.
Every. Last. Fucking. Call. And it’s been going on for almost five years now, because as we know, 9/11 Changed Everything.
Oh, and remember General Hayden, nominated to head the CIA?
In charge of it.
Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, nominated Monday by President Bush to become the director of the CIA, headed the NSA from March 1999 to April 2005. In that post, Hayden would have overseen the agency’s domestic call-tracking program. Hayden declined to comment about the program.
Perhaps he’s declining to comment because it’s WAY THE FUCK BIGGER THAN ANYONE’S ACKNOWLEDGED UP TO NOW.
The NSA’s domestic program, as described by sources, is far more expansive than what the White House has acknowledged. Last year, Bush said he had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop — without warrants — on international calls and international e-mails of people suspected of having links to terrorists when one party to the communication is in the USA. Warrants have also not been used in the NSA’s efforts to create a national call database.
In defending the previously disclosed program, Bush insisted that the NSA was focused exclusively on international calls. “In other words,” Bush explained, “one end of the communication must be outside the United States.”
As a result, domestic call records — those of calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders — were believed to be private.
Sources, however, say that is not the case. With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. Customers’ names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA’s domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information.
But they’re still maintaining that they’re on the up and up with this.
The White House would not discuss the domestic call-tracking program. “There is no domestic surveillance without court approval,” said Dana Perino, deputy press secretary, referring to actual eavesdropping.
She added that all national intelligence activities undertaken by the federal government “are lawful, necessary and required for the pursuit of al-Qaeda and affiliated terrorists.” All government-sponsored intelligence activities “are carefully reviewed and monitored,” Perino said. She also noted that “all appropriate members of Congress have been briefed on the intelligence efforts of the United States.”
Just like the last time, eh, Dana?
God, I’m sick of these people.
H/T Atrios, who reminds us that Qwest resisted governmental pressure to sell out its customers.
Verizon has been my wireless provider for five years now, and in the last year or so, I’ve been looking for alternatives because of what I’ve heard of Verizon’s corporate culture and the fact that you can no longer freely change plans without extending your contract. My current contract expires this month, and since there are wireless providers whose coverage here in Puget Sound is actually superior to Verizon’s, this is the nail in the coffin. See ya.
I hate them…so much…so very, very, much.
Are you trying to get us all arrested?
Piny:
Did you ever hear the George Carlin routine?
He was sure his phone was bugged so he answered:
Hello…Fuck Hoover…yes?
I’m enough of a Luddite to have resisted a cell phone (though I think if I were female I woulda been there early). Still, I don’t think there’s a practical way to avoid Big Brother without employing serious evasive tactics.
Besides, it’s not *arrested*; it’s *indefinitely detained* In Egyptian prisons.
Then there’s this, via Echidne:
Not So Fast!
As usual, Aravosis has the
scoop. Verizon says they are not involved, and that the news stories that say they are are in error.
Some stories say that Qwest was told it was the lone holdout. That may be what Qwest was told by NSA. It also may have been a lie. Or, Verizon may be lying. But we can’t come to a conclusion yet.
I’m a Verizon user. That may change depending on what facts emerge.
Correction — Verizon Wireless says they were not involved.
Well then, if they want to analyze patterns, let’s give them patterns to analyze. Let’s all randomly dial some number somewhere in the Middle East. Doesn’t matter where, or who, or even if you reach anyone. Since they claim they are only monitoring numbers dialed rather than content, if we all just start randomly dialing the Middle East, we can seriously fuck with their so-called analysis.
I’ve been looking for a reason to drop my Verizon land line. The only people who call me are my mom and bill collectors. I think this is enough for me.
Well, Thomas, thanks for pointing that out. I’ll probably still switch, but it’s good to know that, for the time being, my calls weren’t given to the NSA.
I could feel safe because I am not doing anything wrong now, but the definitions of wrong are up to the people who are doing the listening.
Exactly! People who use that argument always seem so sure that what they consider wrong and what the government considers wrong will always be in perfect agreement, but that ain’t necessarily so. Today it’s terrorism. Tomorrow, it might be giving someone information about abortion. And after that, maybe something you care about.
Spokespeople from the government and the telcoms all insist that what they’re doing is in strict accordance with the law, as if we’re suppose to take comfort from that. Of course, what they don’t say is that the law seems to allow them to do whatever the fuck they want.
Ding! Ding! Ding! You get the year’s supply of Rice-A-Roni and a case of Turtle Wax for this one!
I hate to rain on your parade of outrage, Zuzu, but
So, no, they cannot hear you now.
Regarding the actual substance of the program, looking at call patterns is no different from research that telcos do themselves already, nor any different from research and analysis involving citizens’ personal information that, say, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of the Treasury, the Department of Labor, the Department of Education, the Internal Revenue Service, or the legion of other government departments that try to run our lives do.
The truth is, our government already spies on you. It has for decades. The source of your outrage is the Republican administration that’s doing it, and the fact that it’s being done for an aim you disagree with, pure and simple.
Sorry, Shankar. But my outrage is very definitely that the NSA is doing this without warrants AND that the telcos are just handing over information that they normally resist turning over. I’m sure they got paid handsomely, and I’m sure that the fact that they’re trying to do away with net neutrality so that they can control and profit from the internet has a lot to do with it.
That government collects information on various fronts does not change the central fact here: the NSA is gathering information on US citizens on US soil, looking for some nebulous “patterns” of “terrorist” activity. And, praytell, how does gathering information on every single call in the US advance that goal?
I also don’t trust them for a minute when they swear up and down that they’re not recording or listening to phone calls. They also swore up and down that they weren’t listening in on calls placed to or originating outside the US without a warrant, and they swore that they were only tracking calls where one of the parties was outside the US, not calls within the US. And look where we are now.
I’d be just as pissed off if a Democratic administration were doing this. The fact that BOTH Democratic and Republican administrations from 1979 on somehow refrained from warrantless wiretapping and managed to obtain warrants from the rubberstamp FISA court just makes the current situation all the worse. There’s no reason for this.
Shankar, what’s the point at which you think the Government has taken too much power?
Zuzu:
I’m not a trained intelligence analyst, or anything, but say that of a group of a dozen pre-paid cellular telephones, which were all bought from the same store on the same day, one was used to call a number in Syria every Friday between 11pm and 11:05pm for three weeks, after which it was used to call each of the others. This “pattern” could suggest “terrorist” activity. Perhaps further “investigation” would reveal these phones were being used to plan a “bombing” which might kill a lot of “people.”
Fine, don’t. Given that that statement was uncited, my guess is that it comes from the same anonymous sources who gave USA Today the story in the first place. So they’re telling the truth about everything but that part? Or maybe your willingness to believe is more based on what you want to believe, rather than what is likely true.
You mean, like you were when the Clinton administration authorized Carnivore, or extended surveillence with Echelon? My guess is you were too busy defending the Clenis to comment on either of those developments to the length you have here.
Thomas:
We are WAY beyond that point, Thomas. I don’t know how you got, from my post, that I think the government needs more power. My problem is that abuses that are much worse go on, without comment. Do you think monitoring call records is more invasive than, say, collecting information from your employer about how much to withhold from your paycheck every month? Indeed, the latter is FAR more invasive. All of the departments I listed above collect personal information on citizens for various research projects that, frankly, are far less important than investigating terrorist activity. And yet, they are tolerated. Why?
I can’t speak for Zuzu, but I was outraged by Carnivore. I didn’t defend Clinton much after the shameful climb-down that was “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
If we’re way past the point where the government has taken too much power, then why are you not all for using the times when government surveillance produces a scandal to roll back the tide? Shouldn’t you be saying, “See?! I’ve been warning you about government — and now they keep a record of every phone call! And every paycheck! And your work history!”
Instead, you’re saying, in substance, “you placidly accept so much, this is no big deal.” Interesting.
But I’ll tell you why the Bush administration surveillance bothers me more. I never thought that the Clinton administration was going to drag people away to a cell and hold them incommunicado, without judicial sanction and without reference to the Geneva Conventions. I never thought Clinton would grab an American citizen from civillian aviation on American soil and try to put him outside the Constitution. I never thought that Clinton Administration political operatives with top secret clearance would out a CIA agent with a non-official cover to the media to score political points on a critic. I never thought that the Clinton administration would place the director of a film critical of the administration on a visa hold because he has the same name as someone on a terrorist watch-list, forcing him to miss the premier of his own film at Cannes. I never thought that the Clinton administration would cancel government contracts because the vendors were critics of the administration. I never thought that the Clinton administration would threaten to fire civil servants for providing accurate cost estimates to members of Congress.
I’m concerned with the more prosaic aspects of the Bush administration’s surveillance machinery because I know that they they will do bad-guy stuff with it. They are gangsters, with a gangster mentality that they have a right to use anything at their disposal to hurt their enemies — not the terrorists, but their critics here at home.
Your last name is Gupta. Your skin probably isn’t white. If you’re not worried, you’re not paying attention.
And your probable cause for monitoring these calls in the first place would be, what? That they were calling Syria?
Oh, yawn. “Clinton did it too.” Except he didn’t. Echelon involved calls made to or received by people outside the US and complied with FISA. Remember FISA? That nice little rubber-stamp court that gives out the wiretapping warrant? The one that never turned down a request by anyone until Bush came along, and then he just decided to do an end run around it?
And then we have Carnivore, which was an internet surveillance program developed by the FBI who — hey! how novel! — got court warrants prior to using the program!
As for this,
Seek help. Really. This obsession with Clinton’s cock is just embarrassing.
I can add that I didn’t think the GHWB administration would do this, either. And probably not Reagan’s.
Also, do you not see how much overkill it is to track every single call that every single person in the US makes? What’s the point of a database that size if you’re not going to use it?
Here’s an example of how it could be used: the WH is pissed that reporters from the NYT and the WaPo have exposed their secret prisons. They’ve made noises about investigating and/or charging the reporters and certainly the leakers. Wouldn’t it be convenient to have at your disposal a gigantic database of every phone call placed or received in the US, so that all one had to do was, say, punch up the number for Dana Priest’s cell phone or her office phone and you could see who she was talking to? Same goes for whistleblowers, political opponents and critics of the administration (which, let’s remember, are not enemies of the US). How easy to let slip during a nasty primary that your opponent calls a psychiatrist frequently?
Before now, you had to jump through a few hoops to get your hands on this information, and you left a trail of warrants and requests. Maybe it’s not a whole lot of protection, but it does provide some protection from governmental intrusion into your private affairs. But if the telcos are just giving the government this information without even asking, hey! there goes all your protection.
This kind of thing just speaks to the short-sightedness of the administration as well. At some point, this massive apparatus is going to be in the hands of the Democrats.
That was just a wee bit condescending. Besides, isn’t the whole point of the post that the government sees no point in exempting anyone from TIA objectives?
You asked how patterns in calling might be suggestive of terrorist activity. This is one way they might. Any questions?
Hey, I learned the term Clenis from you. S’not me who has a nickname for it.
No, I asked how tracking every last call made by US persons advanced the goal of finding terrorist activity. For all we know, the cell phones in your example were used to call Grandma in Damascus every week and then to pass on news and baklava recipies. You know, because families often buy phones at the same time and speak to one another?
What’s wrong with getting a warrant if there’s probable cause to suspect terrorist activity?
Yeah, I’m sure that the government is going to start rounding up Indians for the camps soon. Who knows what mischief we can wreak with our host of advanced technical degrees?!
After Sikhs were attacked in September and October of 2001, I figured that those of us that were paying attention realized that some folks don’t make those distinctions. But apparently you’re an Indian Hindu, and despite your libertarian pretentions, you’ll wave your hand at anything that you think targets Muslims. Or maybe you just really are not paying attention. If you look like the wrong person or talk to the wrong person and you get whisked away to a military brig somewhere and declared an “enemy combattant,” what it your recourse? As far as I can tell, all you can do is hope that they don’t ship you abroad, and that after a few years the realize they’ve got the wrong guy. If you don’t shit yourself and confess when the bring the dogs in.
Remember, of the ten defendants convicted in the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six bombings in Britain in the 1970s, all ten have since been exonerated, notwithstanding confessions. Both bombings were done by others who later confessed after being incarcerated on other charges, IIRC. We’ve tried the experiment of using extralegal measures to stamp out terrorism before. It results in conduct that we’re ashamed of later, but not in the actual apprehension of terrorists or the crushing of thier networks.
Who have we caught from the 9/11 operation? One guy, kicked out because he was a useless, delusional hanger-on?
Where is that bin Laden guy, anyway? With all this surveillance, surely we know where to go get him?
The main question, Shankar, is this. If you’re against abusive government, why are you minimizing misconduct when it gives you a chance to make your point? Or are you only against government misconduct when it allows you to make a convenient political point?
Conservatarian.
Piny, it was condescending. And mean. I don’t pull punches with these conservatarian assholes. If you want to say I made a racist comment to score debate points, go ahead. You’re entitled to your view.
Thanks! I already did. If I were a conservative, would you have called me a fag to make your point? I don’t see why you feel any need to be a racist asshole; it’s not like Shankar’s stance would be more defensible–by your own logic–if he were white. And since your name is not Gupta, it reads as gloating. Racist gloating. Like you said.
I’m not exactly sure what about my comments here have made it apparent to you that I’m an Indian Hindu, other than my name. You know what they say about assuming.
I am half-Indian, half-assorted anglo. I was born in Los Angeles. I was raised an agnostic and am now an atheist. I get selected for random searches at the airport regularly, but I don’t intepret this as the man trying to keep me down. I remain, to borrow a phrase, as calm as a Hindu cow.
It doesn’t matter if you’re not pulling punches if all you throw is haymakers that don’t land, chief. But enjoy your pretensions of hardassery, they sure seem to serve you well.
In other news, you may be a racist. You should get that looked at.
I may be a racist. I grew up as a white guy in a racist society. I probably ought to get that looked at.
But if you get pulled out for additional scrutiny for the color of your skin and you’re still looking for ways to defend the administration that does it, you’re a fool.
If you don’t care about a government claiming the right to throw people in cells with no oversight and no recourse, then you’re a fool. If you don’t care about it because you think it will only affect Muslims and you’re not one of them, then you’re a bigotted fool. If you don’t care because you believe in the wisdom of the Bush administration not to misuse vast unsupervised power, then you’re a delusional fool.
Zuzu thinks I’ve acted like an asshole. And it is her thread.
I agree with her. I’ve acted terribly and I said a reprehensible, racist thing. I offer no excuse. Shankar, I owe you an apology. I’ve been entirely uncivilized. I’m sorry.
You being a racist is not society’s fault. It is your fault. Sorry.
Of course, I never claimed not to care about any of these things. These are more assumptions you have made, based on what you percieve my political leanings to be. You are not debating with me, your are debating with the conservative hobgoblins of your imagination. I am no longer required for this debate, so I will leave you to it.
Whoops, #33 posted before I caught #32.
As for your comment about my background, apology accepted. Things get heated.
What I said about conservative hobgoblins stands, however.
It is true that the NSA has intercepted virtually every phone call in the world for sometime but this is a wholly different thing. Just because they were intercepted does not mean they were listened to or, and this is the chilling part, categorized. They were just a mass of data. You can’t intercept only part of a stream from a satelite.
If they had a warrent or if no citizen was involved and they were looking for something in particular, then they went data mining.
With a universal database and with a warrent they will simply flag everything that zuzu or Magis or Piny or anybody that irritates them says.
Shankar, it’s hard not to perceive your political leanings when you bring up that tired “Clinton did it too” and “You only care because it’s a Republican administration” crap. And I just don’t know what to think when your main defense of the program is, “Oh, well, they already have access to a lot of information.”
Plenty of conservatives are up in arms about this program as well. There are plenty who value privacy and who can quote from A Man For All Seasons. It’s the ones who still think the sun shines out George Bush’s ass, or that it’ll be really OK if it’s only Muslims who get sent off to camps who are the real fools. Your defenses and your excuses seemed to put you in the latter category.
I’d give piny the credit for that. But I appreciate you apologizing.
Magis, warrants? We don’t need no stinkin’ warrants!
Seriously, that’s the major issue I have: no oversight, no warrant, no traceability, no showing of probable cause. Even with the rubber-stamp from the FISA court, at least there was a record of why the warrant was sought. Here, there’s nothing.
Qwest is normally a very shitty company that screws over its employees once or twice per hour, but I do have to commend them on this, even if it was for PR purposes.
That, or she didn’t have a blog back then on which you could police her opinions.
This kind of thing just speaks to the short-sightedness of the administration as well. At some point, this massive apparatus is going to be in the hands of the Democrats.
Unless they know, or at least are convinced, that it never will. I’m currently wishing I had links handy to all the blog posts that have theorized the adsinistration seems to plan to stay in power forever and that’s why they feel so comfortable seeking to arrogate unlimited power to themselves.
I don’t think I even had a computer back then.
I’m sorry if I’m beating an obvious horse here, but they better well fucking be up in arms! They’re conservatives! Until the necoons came along, their rhetoric was that they were the ones defending our freedoms and the liberals were destroying them and enabling Big Brother.
What a great big bowl of choke-on-your-own-bile stew this is to have a Republican House of Representatives and a Republican Senate and a Republican President serving up this steaming hot plate of shit to dump on the Constitution.
Nothing pleases me more than grand, utter, bitter irony.
Totally lost geek points there.
I had geek points?
You blog, dude.
Blogging makes you a geek?
Oh, no. I thought I was becoming more sociable by doing this.
For what it’s worth:
Link
You can do with that what you will, although given those numbers I think a lot of Republican officeholders would probably be pleased as punch if the Dems decided to make this a campaign issue.
In response to Chuck:
I know it’s become de rigeur for the Left to accuse the current administration of eviscerating the Constitution, but you may want to familiarize yourself with the relevant constitutional precedent on point, Smith v. Maryland, which held that non-content searches (such as those at issue in the NSA program) do not implicate the Fourth Amendment and hence do not require a warrant.
Jon, the events in Smith v. Maryland predate FISA, which gives an objectively reasonable expectation of privacy and thus takes us out of Smith. Moreover, given the way that the government has revealed over time that the program is more and more extensive than previously revealed, I wouldn’t be surprised that the program, in fact, is a content search. Especially in light of a former NSA employee’s statements that this isn’t the end of it.
As for the poll results, people will agree to all kinds of dumb things given incomplete information that they later come to regret when given fuller information. Like voting for George Bush, whose approval ratings just hit 29%.
Jo C:
What is about to happen is that the other shoe is going to drop. I know and you know, if you think it through, is that BushCo isn’t just spying o putative terrorists but rather on their political opponents. Certainly, without accountability, the abuse of power rears its ugly head.
Zuzu, FISA, by its own terms, does not apply to any “process used by a provider or customer of a wire or electronic communication service for billing, or recording as an incident to billing.” That’s what we’re talking about here: lists of dialed phone numbers recorded incident to billing.
Since it is your position that the NSA can’t request anonymous phone records from phone companies without a warrant, is it similarly your position that, say, the Department of Labor can’t request employment data from businesses without a warrant? What’s the distinction?
http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/05/legal-issues-governing-administrations.html
From Lauren’s link:
The issue to which we keep returning, and which I have yet to see you address, is that the NSA’s spying program has been conducted without FISA court approval. This is what makes the program reprehensible. There is a procedure in place that enables the government to quite easily obtain court approval, yet the government has refused to comply with this procedure.
The question is why. And the answer, I suspect, is that the NSA program has been used to monitor political enemies of the adminstration, something the FISA court would not allow despite their past rubber-stamping.
That’s all good and well, but the problem, as even Greenwald admits, is that the government was not using pen registers in this case: it was simply requesting information from private companies, which they voluntarily provided. Perhaps some more information will come to light that will lead me to change my mind in this issue, but so far I’ve yet to see how this is radically different or more intrusive from the hundreds of other ways various government agencies collect information on US citizens without a warrant.
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