NSA has complete access to all phone-company data

The New Yorker posted a rather ominous story on May 22—a story I didn’t find out about till today over at Politipop.

Here are the first three paragraphs:

A few days before the start of the confirmation hearings for General Michael Hayden, who has been nominated by President Bush to be the head of the C.I.A., I spoke to an official of the National Security Agency who recently retired. The official joined the NSA in the mid-nineteen-seventies, soon after contentious congressional hearings that redefined the relationship between national security and the public’s right to privacy. The hearings, which revealed that, among other abuses, the NSA had illegally intercepted telegrams to and from the United States, led to the passage of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to protect citizens from unlawful surveillance. “When I first came in, I heard from all my elders that ‘we’ll never be able to collect intelligence again,’” the former official said. “They’d whine, ‘Why do we have to report to oversight committees?’ ” But, over the next few years, he told me, the agency did find a way to operate within the law. “We built a system that protected national security and left people able to go home at night without worrying whether what they did that day was appropriate or legal.”

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, it was clear that the intelligence community needed to get more aggressive and improve its performance. The Administration, deciding on a quick fix, returned to the tactic that got intelligence agencies in trouble thirty years ago: intercepting large numbers of electronic communications made by Americans. The NSA’s carefully constructed rules were set aside.

Last December, the Times reported that the NSA was listening in on calls between people in the United States and people in other countries, and a few weeks ago USA Today reported that the agency was collecting information on millions of private domestic calls. A security consultant working with a major telecommunications carrier told me that his client set up a top-secret high-speed circuit between its main computer complex and Quantico, Virginia, the site of a government-intelligence computer center. This link provided direct access to the carrier’s network core—the critical area of its system, where all its data are stored. “What the companies are doing is worse than turning over records,” the consultant said. “They’re providing total access to all the data.”

It’s not the least bit surprising that the NSA has access to whatever information it wants whenever it wants. The day The New York Times broke the warrantless wiretapping story, I knew that the government’s surveillance stretched far beyond what we were told.

If I’m doing nothing wrong, I have nothing to fear, right? I guess so, but would you really want to be under surveillance while you and your wife are having sex? Would you want the government to listen in on your conversations—especially if the topic was politics and you weren’t exactly supporting the government?

I think not.

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