Verizon Business, a unit of No. 2 U.S. telephone service provider Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N), said on Wednesday it has won a contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security worth around $678.5 million over 10 years.
… AT&T Government Solutions, a business unit of AT&T Inc (T.N), won a $292 million contract to serve as the secondary network service provider in the Eastern and Western region.

And nothing for Quest.  Read more 

That’s all Internet traffic, foreign and domestic, data and voice. And the decision to do this was taken, not because of 9/11, but as soon as Bush took office. As was the decision to ignore the rule of law. So much for the idea that the extremely benevolent and trustworthy Bush administration was reacting to 9/11, and just wants “surgical” surveillance* to keep us safe from terrorists, eh? Could this program be Spencer Ackerman’s “Project X”?

Anyhow, it’s late, so I can’t do this story justice, but according to Wired:

And in May 2006, a lawsuit filed against Verizon for allegedly turning over call records to the NSA alleged that AT&T began building a spying facility for the NSA just days after President Bush was inaugurated. That lawsuit is one of 50 that were consolidated and moved to a San Francisco federal district court, where the suits sit in limbo waiting for the 9th Circuit Appeals court to decide whether the suits can proceed without endangering national security.

According the allegations in the suit (.pdf):

The project was described in the ATT sales division documents as calling for the construction of a facility to store and retain data gathered by the NSA from its domestic and foreign intelligence operations but was to be in actuality a duplicate ATT Network Operations Center for the use and possession of the NSA that would give the NSA direct, unlimited, unrestricted and unfettered access to all call information and internet and digital traffic on ATTÌs long distance network. […]

The NSA program was initially conceived at least one year prior to 2001 but had been called off; it was reinstated within 11 days of the entry into office of defendant George W. Bush.

An ATT Solutions logbook reviewed by counsel confirms the Pioneer-Groundbreaker project start date of February 1, 2001.

The allegations in that case come from unnamed AT&T insiders, who have never stepped forward or provided any documentation to the courts. But Carl Mayer, one of the attorneys in the case, stands by the allegations in the lawsuit.

“All we can say is, we told you so,” Mayer said.

Mayer says the issue of when the call records program started - a program that unlike the admitted warrantless wiretapping, the administration has never confirmed nor denied - should play a role in the upcoming confirmation hearings of Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey.

Mukasey will have to “come clean on when this program started,” Mayer said. “The entire rationale was that it was necessitated by 9/11.”

Well, yes, Tooliani operative Mukasey should indeed be asked about all this. Hey, here’s an idea: Leader Nance could write Mukasey a Sternly Worded Letter!

And this does explain why the telcos are lobbying so hard for retroactive immunity, doesn’t it?  Read more 

Here’s the trad press follow-up on McConnell’s long interview yesterday in The El Paso Times.

A regional paper (the Globe) and the PST Los Angeles Times. Nothing today from either Pravda on the Potomac or Izvestia on the Hudson. But then, what did we expect?
Yesterday, the very well paid, insured, and seemingly credulous Eric Lichtblau repeated McConnell’s line that the warrantless surveillance program was “surgical”:  Read more 

[Welcome to the French, C&L readers, Blog Report readers, and devotees of the girl in the grey flannel bra.]

[More surprises: Today’s uncritical coverage mindlesly repeats McConnell’s “surgical” obfuscation.]

Surprise!

Honestly, reading the McConnell interview in the El Paso Times, of all places, is like having your head pushed through mush. The guy is just an obfuscatory master of the filibuster. And has anyone ever noticed how much he sounds like Bush the First? (“Don’t want to go there. Just think, lots”; “Just let me leave it, not too much detail.” Na ga happen…)

There’s plenty of Inside Baseball stuff, and McConnell develops his own timeline for the Democrats FISA betrayal, but this exchange leaped out at me, because our hair has been on fire about this for years:

[MCCONNELL] Now there’s a sense that we’re doing massive data mining. In fact, what we’re doing is surgical. A telephone number is surgical. So, if you know what number, you can select it out. So that’s, we’ve got a lot of territory to make up with people believing that we’re doing things we’re not doing.

The warrantless surveillance program targets both voice and data. Ever since Bill Keller allowed James Risen to break this story after Bush was safely elected, when the administration and its enablers wish to conceal the scope of the program, they focus on voice, and don’t mention data at all (see here at “diversionary tactic”). McConnell does that here, and the interviewer—-surprise!—falls for it again.

As the Christian Science Monitor wrote back in 2006:

The US government [outlaw Bush regime] is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity.

A major part of ADVISE involves data-mining - or “dataveillance,” as some call it. It means sifting through data to look for patterns. If a supermarket finds that customers who buy cider also tend to buy fresh-baked bread, it might group the two together.

What sets ADVISE apart is its scope. It would collect a vast array of corporate and public online information - from financial records to CNN news stories - and cross-reference it against US intelligence and law-enforcement records.

This is “surgical”?  Read more 

Of course they’ll use spy satellites for domestic politics*. Why would you even think things could be different? The Times:

At issue is a newly disclosed plan that Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence, approved in May in a memorandum to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, which puts some of the nation’s most powerful intelligence-gathering tools at the disposal of domestic security officials as early as this fall.

The uses include enhancing seaport and land-border security, improving planning to mitigate natural disasters, and determining how best to secure major events, like the Super Bowl or national political conventions**.

Maybe we all just need to start wearing rubber Bush masks (burkas for the women) as our normal, daily attire?  Read more 

[Welcome, Crooks and Liars readers. Remember that the hearing is happening today, so let’s be on the alert to see how—or, it’s be optimistic, if—our Constitution is further shredded by Bush’s monarchical pretensions.]

Prove me wrong. Please.

WaPo’s Dan Eggen writes of the lawsuit:

In 2003, Room 641A of a large telecommunications building in downtown San Francisco was filled with powerful data-mining equipment for a “special job” by the National Security Agency, according to a former AT&T technician.

The secret 24-by-48-foot room described by [whistleblower Mark] Klein was on the sixth floor of a building at 611 Folsom St. in San Francisco. Klein said the NSA “special project” was well known to the small community of company technicians, and he has provided internal documents to the court describing the “cuts” that were required to split Internet traffic and route a signal to the servers and other equipment in the room.

“I conclude that AT&T has constructed an extensive — and expensive — collection of infrastructure that collectively has all the capability necessary to conduct large-scale covert gathering of [Internet protocol]-based communications information, not only for communications to overseas locations, but for purely domestic communications as well,” said [J. Scott] Marcus, a veteran computer network executive who worked at GTE, Genuity and other companies before joining the FCC.

That’s the context, about which our hair has been on fire for quite some time now. What we have left of our hair.

And now, a simple matter of timing:

Tomorrow [that is, today], a three-judge panel will hear arguments on whether the case, which may provide the clearest indication yet of how the spying program has worked, can go forward. So far, evidence in the case suggests a massive effort by the NSA to tap into the backbone of the Internet to retrieve millions of e-mails and other communications, which the government could sift and analyze for suspicious patterns or other signs of terrorist activity, according to court records, plaintiffs’ attorneys and technology experts.

Now, the Republicans would have dearly loved to retroactively legalize all this lawbreaking.

But they couldn’t manage it.

However, Harry and Nancy, when they gutted FISA at midnight before scuttling back to the district, managed to do what the Republicans couldn’t:  Read more 

Please, Dems. Don’t capitulate on this one, too! WaPo:

“[Bush’s proposed rewrite of FISA is] the president’s surveillance program on steroids,” said Jim Dempsey, policy director at the Center for Democracy and Technology. Dempsey said that under the new law the government would no longer have to allege that one party to the call was a member of al-Qaeda or another terrorist group. An unstated facet of the program is that anyone the foreigner is calling inside the United States, as long as that person is not the primary target, would also be wiretapped.

“They’re hiding the ball here,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU’s Washington legislative office. “What the administration is really going after is the Americans. Even if the primary target is overseas, they want to be able to wiretap Americans without a warrant.”

Of… course…. they … do….

Will the zombie-like Beltway Dems march over the cliff toward which Bush is directing them? James Risen (who broke the warrantless surveillance program after the Times suppressed it until Bush was safely elected:  Read more 

Those who have ears to hear, let them hear (Mark 4:9).

Typically, “semantic” is contractor-ese for “deeply bogus shit dreamed up by Marketing,” and the multibillion sale from the black budget is closed by contractors from Shirlington Limo, but with enough budget, smart, conscience-free people, and concern…  Read more 

I mean, come on:

President Bush used his weekly radio address Saturday to urge Congress to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 so the law can better keep pace with the latest technology used by terrorists. [T]he Bush administration says its latest request is narrowly drawn and urgently needed to stymie terrorist threats.

“Narrowly drawn,” eh? By who? John Yoo? David Addington? Some elf in Shooter’s dank basement? Or maybe they dug up some memo from the ’80s when Roberts or Scalito were gnawing away at the foundations of the Republic at Justice?

“The proposal would make clear that court orders are not necessary to effectively collect foreign intelligence about foreign targets overseas,” the national intelligence director, Mike McConnell, wrote congressional leaders Friday.

Er, no, they aren’t, I agree. They are necessary to prevent the administration from pursuing its Master Plan, which goes by the name of Doing Whatever The Fuck We Want Whenever We Want To Do it.

But really, how black can the farce get?  Read more 

[The story of Bush’s odd bike ride near NSA headquarters is at the end. As Josh points out, “the intensity of the covering up doesn’t match the alleged secret.” However, if Bush was personally involved in handling any of the warrantless surveillance data, that would definitely account for the intensity. Foily? Who but the foiliest, back even after 9/11, could have imagined this story would even be happening?]

The Times, today:

A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases, according to current and former officials briefed on the program.

It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate. But such databases contain records of the phone calls and e-mail messages of millions of Americans, and their examination by the government would raise privacy issues.

Well, well. As we wrote over a year ago, after combining careful examination of how Republicans parse their statements with network engineering knowledge available through open sources:

Long story short: (1) Internet surveillance is Bush’s goal, not voice calls; (2) the Republican “wiretap” talking point is a diversion, to voice, away from from Internet surveillance; (3) Bush’s domestic surveillance system would pose no engineering challenges whatever to NSA. No rocket science—or tinfoil hats—required.

Can we please stop talking about “wiretaps” now? It’s not your voice communications Bush wants. It’s your mail.

I don’t have time tonight, alas, to summarize all our work on warrantless surveillance (go read).

So I’ll summarize some key points as I see them. Don your foil:  Read more 

NYT stuck this story in their “Bits” section for technophiles, people who just get gee-whizzed about Cool Shit You Can Do With Machines. How odd this was not considered worthy of the “World” section, or “US” or “Politics”:

The case involves Costas Tslikidis, an electrical engineer who was found hanged in his Athens apartment in March 2005. His death sent shock waves through the country and touched off a scandal at Vodaphone Greece, the national cellular provider where Mr. Tslikidis had worked as a network engineering manager.

Shortly before Mr. Tslikidis’ death — which was never conclusively proven a suicide — Vodaphone had discovered that someone with inside access to the cellphone company switches had been bugging more than 100 high-ranking government officials and dignitaries including the prime minister of Greece, his wife, and the Mayor of Athens beginning shortly before the 2004 summer Olympic Games.
No arrests have been made in the case and suspects mentioned in European press reports focus on foreign intelligence agencies, including the U.S. National Security Agency.

If you wanted to test a project—like, say, bugging cellphone calls without having to use expensive and conspicuous big antennae or something—where would be the best sort of place to do it on a small scale to work the bugs out?  Read more 

Josh Marshall went and talked to Jerry Nadler, and that’s what Nadler says. He’s right. Every time Bush reauthorized the warrantless surveillance program, he broke the law (FISA), which is a felony punishable by five years in jail, as Judge Jackson noted in her decision in Bush v. NSA.

And that’s the program we know about. Nadler wants to find out about the programs we don’t know about—The programs Gonzales carefully parsed his testimony to avoid mentioning.

More choice Nadler quotes:  Read more 

Happy Clusterfuck Day! Good news from the Baltimore Sun:

In the most detailed accounting to date of the origins of the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program, former CIA Director George J. Tenet says the effort was started at the urging of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Cheney’s role at the inception of the NSA program had been hinted at previously in news reports that quoted anonymous sources, but Tenet’s description is the first time [Cheney’s role] has been detailed on the record.

In October 2001, Cheney asked Tenet if the NSA could do more to monitor al-Qaida, and Tenet called Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then the NSA’s director, to relay the message, Tenet says.

Hayden “made it clear we could do no more with existing authorities,” and he and Tenet met with Cheney, Tenet wrote. “Mike laid out what could be done that would be feasible, prudent and effective.”

But Cheney doesn’t do feasible. Or prudent. Or effective.  Read more 

UPDATE 3: Further Froomkin Fun, Same link as in Update 2 in the category of Credit Where Bloggy Credit is Due. Okay, he missed us [sob] but we’ll get over it:

Blogger Josh Marshall writes: “I can say that I am very confident … that orders from Pat Fitzgerald were the reason for the change in White House policy in 2004. So the change in policy was tied to yet another criminal investigation of the White House. And the White House and the key employees in question — namely Karl Rove and people working for him at the White House political office — were specifically on notice not to destroy the emails they sent through the RNC servers. And yet they took affirmative steps to continue destroying them, even after all of this had happened.”

It was in October 2004 that Rove suddenly turned over to Fitzgerald a July 2003 e-mail sent to then-deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley, that clearly showed that Rove had spoken to then-Time magazine reporter Cooper. In subsequent testimony, Rove says he had forgotten the conversation, in which he revealed Plames identity, but remembered it after his lawyers found that e-mail.

Michael Isikoff wrote in Newsweek in October 2005: “Why didn’t the Rove e-mail surface earlier? [Rove’s] lawyer says it’s because an electronic search conducted by the White House missed it because the right ’search words’ weren’t used. (The White House and Fitzgerald both declined to comment.)”

You’ve got to wonder which e-mail account Rove used for that e-mail — and how it was discovered.

And Glenn Greenwald blogs for Salon about the multitude of examples of the Bush administration’s “terrible luck with finding documents.”

UPDATE 2: Froom Fingers Fishy Finagling. Noting the “dog ate our emails” excuse for Rover…er I mean “Rove” and Rove alone, the best journalist at WaPo notes that Waxman is So Wise in the Ways of (Computer) Science:

These new, largely unexplained revelations were included in an extraordinary series of letters that Waxman, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent to 17 government agencies yesterday demanding that they preserve any e-mails received from or sent to non-governmental e-mail accounts used by White House staffers.

So Rove’s end of the emails may be swept out, eh? Well, every mail has two ends at very minimum. Chop-block the recipients. It’s like gathering the shotgun pellets after they’ve been fired rather than while they’re still in the shell…but cops do this every damn day of the week. E-cops too. Go read the whole thing. [WaPo link changed to single-page version rather than their split-into-five-jumps-just-to-cheeze-out-extra-page-hits (or maybe discourage readership of material embarassing to their other staffers?) version.]

UPDATE: Document dump, as in the documents themselves, is now up at the House Judiciary Committee website. Document Dump Discussion, comparison, analysis, etc., is already in progress over at Talking Points Memo. That’s fast-moving so get there early (like now). This is live, realtime and messy so don’t jump to any “OMG!!” moments until you’ve read downthread and, preferably, consulted the original to see if it says what the poster says it says. Once burned, ya know.

*****

The parallel stories of Karl’s Missing Emails—the ones going through Republican National Committee channels which we will refer to as the “.com” ones, as well as the newly-discovered-to-be-(oops!)-“missing” from government files, hereafter called the “.gov” scandal—continues apace. This post will be today’s contribution to the effort to herd the Known Facts, the Unknown Facts, the Facts We Don’t Know We Don’t Know, well you get the point, into one place for convenience of readers.

There may be too much detail for some who have been following this right along. Sorry. There may be too little, particularly in links or supporting documentation, for those who are just hearing about this for the first time and still at the “WTF is the deal with this email shit?” stage. Sorry. We will endeavor to be clear on our sources, with links to reputable outlets who themselves cite sources where possible.

In some cases there will be quotations for which attribution cannot be supplied because they are unable to speak on the record for legal or other reasons. Use whatever standards you usually apply in judging the veracity of these, or else the common sense God gave a goat as my grandmother used to say.

This will be added on to as the day goes on. Some posts may not seem directly related to the topic but mostly likely will as you read along, such as for instance this NYT: Bush Threatens a Veto Over Intel Bill from early this morning. It’s relevant, trust me.  Read more 

(S 2453 is Arlen “Pop Tart” Spectors bill to give Bush a “Get Out Of Jail Free” card on warrantless surveillance.)

It looks like a hardware phone scrambler costs $1600.

That’s absurd, and it probably has a backdoor for the NSA built into it anyhow.

It would seem more reasonable to use VOIP, and do my scrambling in software. Does anyone know of a free, open source, software phone scrambler that runs on a real operating system like linux or the Mac OS X?  Read more 

Remember Ari’s “Watch what you say”? Well, Congress—Democrats and Republicans, mind you—asked NSA what they could safely say about Bush’s felonious, unconstitutional warrantless surveillance program without violating secrecy laws.

And lo! After a time, the NSA answered in this wise, saying “Verily, these are the words that are the bulleted talking points that you may safely say:”.

—“I have personally met the dedicated men and women of the NSA. The country owes them an enormous [but manly] debt of gratitude for their superb efforts to keep us all secure.”

—“I can say that the program must continue. It has detected plots that could have resulted in death or injury to Americans both at home and abroad.”

—“It is being run in a highly disciplined way that takes great pains to protect U.S. privacy rights. There is strict oversight in place, both at the NSA and outside, now including the full congressional intelligence committees.”

Say, am I the only one who thinks these words were written for NSA by the Republican campaign organization?  Read more 

This inquiring mind would like to know.

Talk about burying the lead. In paragraph 31 of a 31 paragraph article, the Baltimore Sun’s Siobhan Gorman shares this tidbit:

Current and former intelligence officials credit employees at the working level for innovating and passing along information in spite of bureaucratic limitations.

Um, I’d like to know a little bit more about what these employees consider “innovative.”

After all, we know that Bush committed over 30 felonies when implementing his warrantless surveillance program, which Judge Jackson has ruled both unconstitutional and illegal. And the fish rots from the head, as we saw in Abu Ghraib, where Bush destroyed the chain of command and accountability for his own plausible deniability on torture.

So, if a felony isn’t a “bureaucratic limitation,” what on earth is?  Read more 

Or perhaps I mean unholy shit.

A federal judge in Detroit has ruled that the NSA program is unconstitutional, and ordered it to be halted.

The AP leads with that order to halt the program.
P.S. Chicago Dyke and I were writing at the same time. Follow me below the fold for a take on what we need to do immediately.  Read more