NID Admits ATT/Verizon Help With Wiretaps

Unlikely_Hero writes "National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell has confirmed in an interview with the El Paso Times that AT&T and Verizon have both been helping the Bush Administration conduct wiretaps. He also claims that only 100 Americans are under surveilance, that it takes 200 hours to assemble a FISA warrant on a telephone number and suggests that companies like AT&T and Verizon that "cooperate" with the Administration should be granted immunity from the lawsuits they currently face regarding the issue."

Lawsuits? Aren't they forgetting...

[IndustrialComplex (975015)]

We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company.

what do you do about searching without a warrant

[by Anonymous Coward]

Several sys admins I know tell me that they routinely get phone calls from folks in the law enforcement community asking for copies of emails and other surveillance. When they ask for a warrant or a national security letter, they never hear back again. How cooperative are we supposed to be? I realize that 200 hours is a lot of work, but how else can we stop freelance investigations and abuse?

Re:what do you do about searching without a warran

[Saint Aardvark (159009)]

I'm stealing this from training I went to at LISA [sage.org] last year: you tell the LEO (law enforcement officer) politely, but firmly, that as company policy you're happy to help, but all such requests must be directed to the legal department.

The legal dep't will look at it and decide what to do, and then you do it. They know their job, you know yours; they don't make decisions about storage capacity or OS support, and you and I don't make decisions about constitutionality or legality. And if/when you've got the information they're looking for, you pass it back to the lawyers and they hand it over to the LEO.

This covers your ass, your company's ass, and the LEO's ass (assuming you or your friends aren't being socially engineered). Any LEO should be happy to talk to the lawyers.

Now, all that said...I realize that this leaves out questions of conscience. If Mark Klein [wired.com] hadn't had spilled the beans, we'd have been a lot longer finding out about this problem. But as a rule, I think those situations are rare; most law enforcement stuff is <handwave>your garden variety stuff -- robbery, fraud, yadda yadda</handwave> (sorry, no citation to back that up) -- and the odds of being involved in something truly offensive is pretty slim. I hope it stays that way.

Due Process..

[lionchild (581331)]

There's a reason it takes over 200 hours to assemble what you need to get a wiretap warrant. Due proccess is meant to insure that honest people have privacy preserved, and that the resources we have are being focused on those who really are potentially criminial.

Is it perfect? No, probably not. But it's what we have setup now and short-cutting due process isn't the answer to finding a better way.

Re:Due Process..

[downix (84795)]

Indeed. Due process is a concept often forgotten in this day and age, but it was one of the foundations that the United States were founded on. Do things right, or don't do them at all I say.

Um, wha?

[downix (84795)]

200 hours to get a FISA warrant? No, the FISA system is pretty well documented. If you come to the judge with the right level of evidence, it takes a matter of a pen stroke.

They might be claiming it takes 200 hours to get that level of evidence but that is very misleading. It took less than 14 hours for the FBI investigators persuing Zacarias Moussaoui to apply for his FISA warrant.

Re:Um, wha?

[OpenGLFan (56206)]

Agreed. They're not doing 200 hours (or even 200 man-hours) of paperwork -- it shouldn't take a Master's Thesis to get a FISA warrant.

In fact, the admission that they have to spend an additional 200 hours gathering evidence is a clear admission of wrongdoing on their part. Our Constitution provides security against arbitrary searches and seizures; if it takes 200 additional hours to gather enough evidence to form a mere suspicion of wrongdoing, then the initial justification for the wiretap must be fairly flimsy.

Still using that tired, sad old line?

[Sunburnt (890890)]

Even as he shed new light on the classified operations, McConnell asserted that the current debate in Congress about whether to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act will cost American lives because of all the information it revealed to terrorists.

"Part of this is a classified world. The fact that we're doing it this way means that some Americans are going to die," he said.

This is ridiculous. It seems reasonable that shadowy international criminal figures assume that their conversations are being monitored. Presumably they know that they're targets of one of the world's most technologically advanced intelligence agencies. That's not even counting the fact that most recent incidents of terrorism [wikipedia.org] have been homegrown, and as likely to be about abortion [cnn.com] or good ol' anti-government paranoia [wkrn.com] as they are about U.S. support for Israel. [cnn.com] If it's taking you 200 hours to get a warrant, Mike, then perhaps the government could find some wasted money [wikipedia.org] that might be better spent fixing our overburdened legal system.

Every time the courts point out that the Constitution might have some bearing on this administration's actions, the "dead Americans" flag gets waved. Nothing new here.

The unanswered question...

[Jason Levine (196982)]

Any Bush supporters out there? Ok, asking for a Bush supporter on Slashdot is probably like walking into a Microsoft board meeting and asking how many people run Linux. ;-)

Still, every time this subject comes up, I ask the same series of question and I have yet to get a reply from any Bush supporters (even when there are Bush supporters replying to the topic). The question is: Would you like the next administration to have unsupervised warrant-less wiretapping capabilities? What if the administration was run by Hillary Clinton? Would you trust her to use it properly and not abuse it.

Even if you ignore any current abuses of the system (as I'm sure Bush supporters do) and assume that Bush just has our best interests at heart, you can't say the same about the next administration. Or the one after that. To give any branch of government unchecked power is extremely dangerous. It's not a matter of *will* it be abused, but *when will* it be abused. That's why the Constitution set up 3 houses of power (Congress, President, Courts) and gave them the ability to check each other's power. (e.g. Congress can make a law, President can veto it, Congress can override the veto, Courts can strike it down, Congress can pass it as a Constitutional Amendment.) Unsupervised warrant-less wiretapping is unconstitutional and the only way it's being pushed forward is through major FUD. (Americans *WILL DIE* if you don't let us do whatever we want to do!!!!)

Re:The unanswered question...

[Jtheletter (686279)]

(For example, in what you said, the courts do NOT have the legitimate power to arbitrarily strike down a law.)

The parent poster never used the term arbitrary, nor implied it, you added that to support your own argument. The courts do indeed have the power to strike down a law if it is unconstitutional or overly broad, etc.; however it must be brought before the court by someone with proper standing, i.e. someone who has been harmed by or prosecuted under said law. To claim that the courts do not have this power is not only wrong, but easily refuted by over a century of case law.
The problem at hand with the FISA issue is that the wiretaps are being used on Americans, located in America. It is not the cases of purely foreign wiretaps that people have issue with, it is the unsupervised use of them against NON-foreigners that is the problem. And the fact that the administration knowingly and willingly sidestepped mandatory FISA regulations early on in the process? Are they to be left completely unaccountable for that? You seem like a reasonable person who accepts the rule of law, however you also seem to be turning a blind eye to the fact that the very laws and checks you are advocating and believe in have already been breached. Also, the justification for expansion of powers along the lines of "we've stopped/will stop lots of crimes but we can't tell you about any of them" is hardly an acceptable reason for a government supposedly of and for the people. Do you disagree that a system of checks and balances cannot properly function if one side is completely cloaked in secrecy?

Understandable Misunderstanding

[Spamsonite (154239)]

There is understandably a tremendous amount of misunderstanding by the American people about how collection targets are designated, and there is a large body of law that governs how the process must take place. While it is true that almost any transmission of data, voice or otherwise, through this country can be monitored, the sheer scale of daily communications quickly renders random sampling useless. Call records are not call recordings - can you imagine just how much storage would be required to save for posterity the billion or so phone conversations that happen each day in this country? Even running a simple query on a database containing recent activity (not the conversation, just the fact that a call happened) can take hours. It is simply not done, both for time and practicality reasons - and because collecting on a non-designated target is very highly illegal.

Every intel collector and analyst is trained from day one in the law, whether they be military or civilian. They can all quote the name and contents of the document that governs the ways the NSA and our government may designate intel targets both within and without our own borders. Anyone who collects on a target that has not been sanctioned from on-high, even if it is his or her own phone number, is on a fast track to prison.

The targets that are being monitored within our own borders are so because the trail from overseas led back here. Known terrorists, affiliates, fund raisers, materials providers, etc., made calls to people here in the USA, or people in the USA called them. The foreign phone would already be under surveillance, and of course the connection to the USA should raise questions for any sane law enforcement agency. The law provides for monitoring US citizens in this and other very narrowly-defined cases, though they must still be officially designated as targets, which is not a simple process. Even the warrantless taps only give a day or so of leeway, the government must prove in a hurry that they really need to be listening in or all data must be purged.

And perhaps the most important reason that you can go through your day without worrying if someone is listening in to you asking your Aunt Bea to bring her special blueberry pie to the family reunion is that analysts are Americans and have Aunt Bea's too, and they have the same expectation of privacy that you have. If they participate in a big-brother system that monitors our populace at a whim, then it's only a matter of time before that system grows and starts to eat its own.

The intel community is a very paranoid place - both about what others are doing, but incredibly more so about that activities of its own members.

wHY ADMIT?

[redelm (54142)]

Do you think the NID just let this slip? Of course not. He's whining and preparing an excuse for the next missed intelligence.

The fundamental problem is that civil liberties are barely permit after-the-fact punishment of criminals. Many get off because their liberties were violated. That's OK, because the criminal justice system doesn't need to convict everyone, it just needs to act as a deterrent.

Using the criminal justice system to prevent wrongdoing [terrorism] is not what it was designed to do. Preventative vs investigative. Airtight vs failure-tolerant. It requires unusual actions and far greater intrusion into liberties (esp privacy). Some [frightened] people are willing to sacrifice others liberties (and perhaps their own). Others are not. A fundamental conflict between different people. Politicians can exploit this and choose whichever side they wish.

Personally, I will not give in to the terrorists. I will not become fearful.

A simple lesson needs to be taught

[kwandar (733439)]

... put their executives in jail. I wouldn't stand by and acquiesce to illegal activities, why should they be allowed to, irrespective of who asked?

HEEEELLLLLLL NO!

[spikedvodka (188722)]

suggests that companies like AT&T and Verizon that "cooperate" with the Administration should be granted immunity from the lawsuits they currently face regarding the issue."

If a company illegally gives information (hypothetically about me) to the government, as part of an illegal plan. Not only should I be able to sue their pants off (to the point where I can pay not only for my kids' college education through to 5 PHDs, but also afford to pay to have an OC-3 line run right to my house) but they should be brought up on criminal charges.

Enough already with this "You so something bad for us and you're safe" bit.

Soap (check) -> Ballot (Check) -> Jury (Forbidden by Law) -> Ammo?

I'm not one to advocate for violence, but ya'know... when you have eliminated the impossible (or ineffective in this case) whatever remains...

this makes me mad

Wait, there's an NID?

[Mercano (826132)]

Wait, there's really an NID? I thought it was just something they made up for Stargate and staffed with former Star Trek cast members.

Sloppy Mistake or Sly Lie

[toddhisattva (127032)]

From the article,

McConnell also revealed that fewer than 100 people inside the United States are monitored under FISA warrants.

From the submission,

He also claims that only 100 Americans are under surveilance

The submitter assumed, or purposely misinterpreted, "100 people inside the United States" to mean "100 Americans." The first is a sloppy mistake, the second is a deliberate lie.

There are many people inside the United States who are not Americans. The communications laws (IIRC from my work and play in the industry) use the broadly expansive category "US persons" which means anybody physically in the country.

There are green card holders and other legitimate workers, resident aliens of all kinds, and illegal aliens, just to name a few.

Other non-American inside the USA include students, tourists, and Democrats.

Re:Unless

[monk.e.boy (1077985)]

Hey, fed up with [windows|USA] why not try [Linux|UK]?

...and I bet this is never nodded funny by the Americans ;-P

Re:Unless

[MMC Monster (602931)]

The President grants executive powers to do what he wants. Seriously though, it shouldn't even really be one U.S. citizen that they do this with. When does the fear mongering to get broad reaching government powers end? I'm so damned tired of it, and this country has slid so far downhill in the last 5 or so years due to it. Just about every other nation looks at the U.S. in a bad light these days because we're prudish, invasive, annoying, and hipocritical. I'm getting to the point where I want to purge the entire administration from the lowest congressman all the way up and start over. Take out the special interest groups, no corporate sponsorships for campaigns, and get rid of the all the harpy lobbyists. I'm just so sick of it.

It's not that the government shouldn't wiretap their own population. Of course, they should be able to. The FISA courts are secret so that they can get warrants to do this sort of thing. It's when the government doesn't bother getting the warrants that things get illegal.

No company should surrender private communications to the government without a warrant. And if they do, the public can sued them.

Re:Unless

[spikedvodka (188722)]

No company should surrender private communications to the government without a warrant. And if they do, the public can sued them.

So if the Japanese had discussed the attack on Pearl Harbor amongst themselves but over AT&T phone lines, you're arguing that AT&T should have conspired with the Japanese to keep the attack secret? There's no kind of warrant that applies to foreign enemy powers. Warrants are for criminal prosecutions. Also warrants are issued by judges, and judges are constitutionally excluded from issues involving the waging of war.

no, that's not what the GP is saying. There would be no conspiring involved, because until the warrant was issued (and served) AT&T would have no way of knowing what was being said over their lines.

Re:Unless

[turbofisk (602472)]

Of course there is a lot of truth in this... France did have a lot of presence in Iraq and made a bundle, but the *people* are pissed about something else. Saying that the world is pissed out of envy and money is just pure bs. There is the whole spectrum your carelessly choose to ignore. How about invading a sovereign country, killing thousands of civilians and generally destabilizing the middle east even more while doing some cowboy shit about terrorists are behind every stone and thus any measure is ok. Generally you have polarized the world as well, either your with us or your against us. Saddam was a dictator and we can't have that... All while supporting other countries who are run by dictatorship. Of the top of my head: Using capital punishment on your own citizens is a biggie. Degrading taliban and terrorists to Enemy combatant and thus denying them the rights of the Geneva Convention. No trials either. By doing this, imo you have let the terrorists destroy what you are trying to defend - freedom. And at the same time those who are whistleblowers get the sharp end of the stick for doing just that, ensuring that illegal stuff doesn't pass. I'm from Sweden and there is a general resentment that just wasn't there during the Clinton era.

Re:Unless

[orzetto (545509)]

We've liberated the French two times [...]

No you didn't. To begin with I do not think you (singular) served in both WWI and WWII, so stop bragging about "We".

In WWI the US had hardly a modern army to speak of. The US entered the war late and did little. It may be debated whether they tipped the balance, but it is a fact that Germany and Austria-Hungary were already at the brink of collapse in 1917. And anyway, Germany in WWI was just any nation at war, no better or worse than the other ones. They had not even started the war (Austria-Hungary did), so what's the point in talking of "liberation"? From what? In any case, the US sacrificed very little compared to the British, yet I don't hear the British whine so much about the French being ungrateful.

In WWII, most of the work to win the war was done by the Soviets. On any reasonable scale (soldiers dead, enemy soldiers killed, land lost, land gained, overall number of dead, ...), the Soviet Union sacrificed much more than the US, even counting in the Pacific theatre where only the US were active. The eastern front saw the two most bloody battles in human history at the same time (Leningrad and Stalingrad), each three times larger than the one in third place (battle of Wuhan). Had the US stayed out, France would have been liberated by the USSR instead of the USA, or it would simply have risen up and taken back sovereignty when Berlin would eventually have fallen to the Red Army.

So cut the "we saved the world"-crap. The reason the US emerged as a superpower after WWII was that they had gone through two world wars without a single enemy soldier on their terrain, and had entered only when the outcome was almost guaranteed. Just like Switzerland, the US found out that not having armies marching through your country is beneficial to the economy.

[...] the largest fraud in world history.

According to Transparency International, the most corrupt politician ever was Suharto, dictator of Indonesia. Do I have to tell you who installed the guy, let him carry genocidal policies including but not limited to the invasion of East Timor?

You don't think this hatred is idealogical or that these countries don't spy on their own citizens, do you?

I don't "hate America", I think people (Americans, French, Congolese, Tikopians) who refuse to hear criticism of their own country, stick by the motto "good or bad it's my country", or trust the government (any government) are stupid and a threat to democracy.

Re:Unless

[smilindog2000 (907665)]

Well, here's an apology: I personally apologize for being an American and not doing more to stop our government from it's recent brainless actions, including invading Iraq, causing a rise in terrorism world-wide, and putting the breaks on democratic reforms in our own country, and others through our own terrible example to the world. I voted against Bush both times, donated $100, to the EFF to help them sue AT&T, and ran bushshitlist.org for a while, to help educate people about his mistakes. And I'm no Republican hater - my favorite president since I've been alive is the Bush Senior.

Fortunately, even we Americans eventually wise-up. Bush is the most hated president in America since I've been alive (early 60's). I don't bother running bushshitlist.org anymore, because even the National Enquirer now publicizes the stupidity of many of this administrations actions. I've found that Americans fall into several groups, and we have very little mobility between them. The 'religious right' is hard-core in the Bush camp, making up 18% of Americans, and the majority of Bush's remaining meager support. Both Democrats and Republicans split about 20% of Americans that I call "glass eaters": smart people who would rather eat glass than criticize a president from their own party. There are also plenty of stupid people in every country, and we Americans are no exception. You gotta love Brittney Spear's support of Bush, for example. You also gotta love the stupidity of the Dixie Chicks attacking Bush. The dumber of us let actors and performers affect our opinions, and we tend to elect them to high offices. Then, there's a minority of Americans who can make up their own minds, and have at one point supported a Republican or a Democrat, based on their performance. This last category is the largest group, but unfortunately the others tend to outvote us.

All that said, America is still the world's greatest country, in my not so humble opinion. We've just got some clean-up work to do.

Re:Unless

[Laxitive (10360)]

Here's the thing, there's probably not much that you need to personally apologize for (I'm guessing here.. I don't know you, who knows). What's missing is a national, formal acceptance of fault. Many in your country need to let go of the idea that accepting a mistake on the part of their country is tantamount to pissing on their graves of their ancestors.

Without an explicit acceptance of what your country ended up doing wrong, there is little hope of avoiding a repeat of the exact same thing in some other context. How are you, as a nation, going to educate your children so that they don't fall for the exact same trap when some tragedy strikes their country when THEY are the electorate? How is it possible to do this when every single time someone brings up a criticism, some weasel pops out of the waxwork to distract attention towards irrelevant actions by others? How is your personal apology going to combat that?

Your attitude seems to be one of putting things behind you and moving on.. which is understandable considering the embarassing trauma I'm sure you are suffering from.. but this is the wrong reaction to have. At the very least, your country owes it to the millions of people whose lives were ruined in part because of its actions, to examine what went wrong, reconcile with it, and put in place measures to avoid it. And don't for a second let yourself think that this expectation is somehow limited to just America. Every country has that obligation. Some may live up to that obligation, and others may not, but whether or not some other country holds itself up to a high standard shouldn't be a basis for excusing your own. It may seem to many that America receives an unfair amount of attention on this front.. but for christ's sake.. you're the most powerful nation in the world. Your influence affects EVERYBODY.. so OF COURSE people are going to scrutinize your actions more than the actions of others. You should welcome that, and rise to the challenge, and not run up a tree like a flayed cat.

Also, don't take this as me personally addressing you. I am speaking towards general tendencies I identify in your country's population, in your media, in your national social identity.

Now, I'm not sure abut your claim about America being the world's "greatest country", but I'd agree that your country has a many qualities that others could learn from, and that you have great potential.. for both good and bad. Your history is full of examples of both, and pointing out the bad does not detract from the good. Likewise, pointing out the good does not excuse the bad (and neither does pointing out the bad in others), and does not excuse the need for an honest self-appraisal amongst your citizens on the role their country plays in the world. This is one area where your people have been far too lax.

Re:100 americans denied due process

[spikedvodka (188722)]

It didn't say 100 Americans. It said 100 people living in this country. They are most probably not citizens and they are not entitled to the same rights as citizens.

Generally, I find fellow citizens are less likely to try to kill us. Cut me off in traffic, sure, destroy the local water plant, no.

Funny... I don't remembering anything in the constitution that says that "civil rights are only for citizens" my understanding was that the laws applied equally to everybody in the country, Citizen, visitor, illegal alien.

I find the concept that "They are not entitled to the same rights as citizens" a very common, and disturbing concept.

That being said, there are some very specific rights, that are explicitly awarded to citizens (see the 26th amendment), for example the right to vote. the fact that other rights don't explicitly state that they are for citizens, would very strongly imply that they are for all people in the country

Re:My guess....

[AtariDatacenter (31657)]

Despite your typos, I'd mod you up if I had the points. I didn't see them specifiy if it was wall clock hours or man hours. (I suppose you could further argue that they don't specify if any part of the man-hours are counted again for a different warrant, or if these were dedicated and discrete man hours to this. Much less how far down into the indirect support roles are included.)

So 200 hours could mean that someone entered something onto a screen in a computer system in five minutes and it was done. But they go back and count the time it takes to maintain the system, the techs to actually do the work, the approval process with multiple people, etc etc.

Or it could mean that from the time the process started, it takes 8 days for the wiretap to be in place.

Either way, I think this is a number used to create an impression rather than to convey any meaningful information.