[NYTr] US: Role of Telecom Firms in Wiretaps Confirmed

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

NY Times via Corporate Watch - Aug 24, 2007
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14666

US: Role of Telecom Firms in Wiretaps Is Confirmed

by Eric Lichtblau

The Bush administration has confirmed for the first time that American
telecommunications companies played a crucial role in the National
Security Agency’s domestic eavesdropping program after asserting for
more than a year that any role played by them was a “state secret.”

The acknowledgment was in an unusual interview that Mike McConnell, the
director of national intelligence, gave last week to The El Paso Times
in which he disclosed details on classified intelligence issues that
the administration has long insisted would harm national security if
discussed publicly.

Mr. McConnell made the remarks apparently in an effort to bolster
support for the broadened wiretapping authority that Congress approved
this month, even as Democrats are threatening to rework the legislation
because they say it gives the executive branch too much power. It is
vital, he said, for Congress to give retroactive legal immunity to the
companies that assisted in the program to help prevent them from facing
bankruptcy because of lawsuits over it.

“Under the president’s program, the terrorist surveillance program, the
private sector had assisted us, because if you’re going to get access,
you’ve got to have a partner,” Mr. McConnell said in the interview, a
transcript of which was posted by The El Paso Times on Wednesday.

AT&T and several other major carriers are being sued over their
reported role in the program, which permitted eavesdropping without
warrants on the international communications of Americans suspected of
terrorism ties. The administration has sought to shut down the lawsuits
by invoking the state-secrets privilege, refusing even to confirm
whether the companies helped conduct the wiretaps.

Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
which is heading up the lawsuit against AT&T, said her group might ask
the appeals court to consider Mr. McConnell’s comments in deciding
whether the state-secrets argument should be thrown out.

“They’ve really undermined their own case,” Ms. Cohn said.

Mr. McConnell said those suits were a driving force in the
administration’s efforts to include in this month’s wiretapping
legislation immunity for telecommunications partners. “If you play out
the suits at the value they’re claimed,” he said, “it would bankrupt
these companies.”

Congress agreed to give immunity to telecommunications partners in the
measure , but refused to make it retroactive.

Mr. McConnell, who took over as the country’s top intelligence official
in February, warned that the public discussion generated by the
Congressional debate over the wiretapping bill threatened national
security because it would alert terrorists to American surveillance
methods.

“Now part of this is a classified world,” he said in the interview.
“The fact we’re doing it this way means that some Americans are going
to die.”.

Asked whether he was saying the news media coverage and the public
debate in Congress meant that “some Americans are going to die,” he
replied: “That’s what I mean. Because we have made it so public.”

Mr. McConnell, though, put new information on the public record in the
interview, on Aug. 14 while in Texas for a border conference.

Mr. McConnell said, for instance, that the number of people inside the
United States who were wiretapped through court-approved warrants
totaled “100 or less” but on the “foreign side, it’s in the thousands.”
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which approves national
security wiretaps, told Congress it approved 2,181 eavesdropping
warrants last year. The court and the administration have not been
willing to break out how many Americans were in those orders.

Mr. McConnell did not make clear the time frame for his estimate, nor
was it clear whether he was referring to the security agency’s program
of eavesdropping without warrants, which was brought under the
oversight of the intelligence court in January. Officials in his office
refused to clarify what he meant.

Mr. McConnell also offered the administration’s first public discussion
about a classified series of rulings by the intelligence court that he
said had restricted the agency’s ability to collect foreign
intelligence.

He said one judge this year gave broad approval for the agency’s
eavesdropping program. But another judge, he said, ruled in the spring
that the administration would have to obtain a warrant for any “foreign
to foreign” communications that passed through an American
telecommunications center.

The administration obtained a stay of that ruling until May 31, he
disclosed, but after that date he intelligence officials had
“significantly less capability” to track foreign communications. The
ruling sent the administration “in the wrong direction,” he added.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which has petitioned the
intelligence court to make public its secret wiretapping rulings,
expressed frustration on Thursday with the timing of Mr. McConnell’s
comments.

“If this ostensibly sensitive information can be released now, why
could it not be released two months ago, when the public and Congress
desperately needed it?” asked Jameel Jaffer, director of the group’s
national security project.

Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the
Federation of American Scientists, said the interview “was quite
striking because he was disclosing more detail than has appeared
anywhere in the public domain.”

“If we’re to believe that Americans will die from discussing these
things,” Mr. Aftergood said, “then he is complicit in that. It’s an
unseemly argument. He’s basically saying that democracy is going to
kill Americans.”