After Mr. Nacchio's initial refusal to cooperate with the government's illegal conspiracy against the American people, the N.S.A. kept pressuring him for months, and retaliated against Qwest by refusing the company other contracts that they had previously offered that were legal.
Qwest's then-head of government business, James F. X. Payne, said in a 2006 interview with the F.B.I. that, "Nacchio said it was a legal issue and that they could not do something their general counsel told them not to do...Nacchio projected that he might do it if they could find a way to do it legally."
Glenn Greenwald notes that, "Nacchio submitted voluminous (and heavily redacted) documentation (.pdf) detailing the vast number of projects which the Bush administration was pursuing in joint cooperation with the telecom industry."
...the Nacchio documents leave no doubt that these telecoms were viciously competing with one another for the right to cooperate with the Federal Government -- long before 9/11 -- because they were hungry for the multi-billion dollar contracts for this work.
There is obviously nothing inherently wrong with corporations competing for lucrative government contracts. But the work they were to perform here -- in providing unfettered data and other information regarding the communications of Americans -- was illegal under multiple federal laws enacted precisely to prohibit telecoms from providing access without warrants to the data and content of their customers's calls.
Nacchio's lawyers pointed out that several lawsuits had already been filed against other telecoms for violating their customers' privacy. One of those suits claimed that seven months before the 9/11 attacks, right about the same time of the N.S.A.'s meeting with Nacchio, AT&T "began development of a center for monitoring long distance calls and Internet transmissions and other digital information for the exclusive use of the N.S.A." The NYT said:
The lawsuit contends that the center would "give the N.S.A. direct, unlimited, unrestricted and unfettered access" to phone call information and Internet traffic on AT&T’s network.
That lawsuit was reported on Bloomberg in a June 2006 article, Spy Agency Sought U.S. Call Records Before 9/11, Lawyers Say. Court papers were filed in a New York federal court on June 23, 2006. The plaintiff's attorney, Carl Meyer, said, "The Bush Administration asserted this became necessary after 9/11. This undermines that assertion."
The lawsuit is related to an alleged NSA program to record and store data on calls placed by subscribers. More than 30 suits have been filed over claims that the carriers, the three biggest U.S. telephone companies, violated the privacy rights of their customers by cooperating with the NSA in an effort to track alleged terrorists.
AT&T spokesman Dave Pacholczyk said, "The U.S. Department of Justice has stated that AT&T may neither confirm nor deny AT&T's participation in the alleged NSA program because doing so would cause 'exceptionally grave harm to national security' and would violate both civil and criminal statutes.''
And Ryan Singel says in another piece at Threat Level:
Startling statements from former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio's defense documents alleging the National Security Agency began building a massive call records database seven months before 9/11 aren't the only accusations that the controversial program predated the attacks of 9/11...
...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.
The suit (.pdf) outlines some details of the program, and says, "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."
Way back in November of 2003, C-Span host Brian Lamb interviewed James Bovard, author of Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice, and Peace to Rid the World of Evil. Bovard spoke of a program called "Carnivore," which he described as "an e-mail vacuum that the FBI uses" to make copies of all the e-mail of an Internet Service Provider's customers. You can read all you want to know - and more - about Carnivore here. Mr. Bovard says:
It would be the equivalent if the FBI had a search warrant for one person's house, they went to that house and then decided, to be safe, they'd search all the houses in a two-mile radius around that house. I mean, it makes a travesty of the 4th Amendment.
