On orders from Defense Department officials and President Bush, the agency kept a running list of the names of Americans in its system and made it readily available to a number of senior officials in the Bush administration, ...which in essence meant the NSA was conducting a covert domestic surveillance operation in violation of the law.
And yet another unnamed telecom "official" provides more information:
According to the online magazine Slate, an unnamed official in the telecom industry said NSA's "efforts to obtain call details go back to early 2001, predating the 9/11 attacks and the president's now celebrated secret executive order. The source reports that the NSA approached U.S. carriers and asked for their cooperation in a 'data-mining' operation, which might eventually cull 'millions' of individual calls and e-mails."
Now if that all sounds speculative, or based on accounts of anonymous sources, this ought to put to rest any doubt that illegal spying started well before any attacks occured.
An October 2007 article in the New York Times bears the headline, Former Phone Chief Says Spy Agency Sought Surveillance Help Before 9/11 . The source is anything but anonymous.
The phone company Qwest Communications refused a proposal from the National Security Agency that the company's lawyers considered illegal in February 2001, nearly seven months before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, the former head of the company contends in newly unsealed court filings.
The executive, Joseph P. Nacchio, also asserts in the filings that the agency retaliated by depriving Qwest of lucrative outsourcing contracts.
This is the man who headed one of the few telecoms who refused the government's illegal request to provide information on all of its customers - and paid for it dearly. He ended up on trial for "insider trading" charges, which he said had been cooked up because of his decision to disobey his masters' unlawful requests for him to become complicit in a felony.
Mr. Nacchio said last year that he had refused an N.S.A. request for customers' call records in late 2001, after the Sept. 11 attacks, as the agency initiated domestic surveillance and data mining programs to monitor Al Qaeda communications.
But the documents unsealed Wednesday in federal court in Denver, first reported in The Rocky Mountain News on Thursday, claim for the first time that pressure on the company to participate in activities it saw as improper came as early as February, nearly seven months before the terrorist attacks.
A concurrent article in the Washington Post says the same thing.
...Nacchio attorney Herbert Stern said that in fall 2001, Qwest was approached to give the government access to the private phone records of Qwest customers. At the time, Nacchio was chairman of the president's National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee.
"Mr. Nacchio made inquiry as to whether a warrant or other legal process had been secured in support of that request," Stern said. "When he learned that no such authority had been granted and that there was a disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process, including the Special Court which had been established to handle such matters, Mr. Nacchio concluded that these requests violated the privacy requirements of the Telecommunications Act."
That little tid-bit puts the lie to Bush's claim that he was just acting out of love and concern for our health and well-being "'cuz the terrists was gonna git us." That was well before he had reason to break the law to "perteck the 'Merkin' people." The NYT continues:
But the court filings in Mr. Nacchio's case illustrate what is well known inside the telecommunications industry but little appreciated by the public: that the N.S.A. has for some time worked closely with phone companies, whose networks carry the telephone and Internet traffic the agency seeks out for intercept....The documents reflect constant meetings and negotiations between the agency and Qwest officials over the global communications network.
The court records say that the N.S.A. made a proposal to Nacchio which he refused - but the substance of the proposal is censored in the documents. And the documents also state, "The court has prohibited Mr. Nacchio from eliciting testimony regarding what also occurred at that meeting."
