[Clips] Spy Agency Sought U.S. Call Records Before 9/11, Lawyers Say

[R.A. Hettinga]

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  Date: Sun, 2 Jul 2006 18:13:13 -0400
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  From: "R.A. Hettinga" <rah at shipwright.com>
  Subject: [Clips] Spy Agency Sought U.S. Call Records Before 9/11, Lawyers Say
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  <http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20670001&refer=&sid=abIV0cO64zJE>

  Bloomberg

  Spy Agency Sought U.S. Call Records Before 9/11, Lawyers Say

  June 30 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to
  help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the
  Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court papers filed in
  New York federal court.

  The allegation is part of a court filing adding AT&T, the nation's largest
  telephone company, as a defendant in a breach of privacy case filed earlier
  this month on behalf of Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp.
  customers. The suit alleges that the three carriers, the NSA and President
  George W. Bush violated the Telecommunications Act of 1934 and the U.S.
  Constitution, and seeks money damages.

  ``The Bush Administration asserted this became necessary after 9/11,''
  plaintiff's lawyer Carl Mayer said in a telephone interview. ``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.

  ``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,'' AT&T spokesman Dave Pacholczyk
  said in an e-mail.

  U.S. Department of Justice spokesman Charles Miller and NSA spokesman Don
  Weber declined to comment.

  Pioneer Groundbreaker

  The NSA initiative, code-named ``Pioneer Groundbreaker,'' asked AT&T unit
  AT&T Solutions to build exclusively for NSA use a network operations center
  which duplicated AT&T's Bedminster, New Jersey facility, the court papers
  claimed. That plan was abandoned in favor of the NSA acquiring the
  monitoring technology itself, plaintiffs' lawyers Bruce Afran said.

  The NSA says on its Web site that in June 2000, the agency was seeking bids
  for a project to ``modernize and improve its information technology
  infrastructure.'' The plan, which included the privatization of its
  ``non-mission related'' systems support, was said to be part of Project
  Groundbreaker.

  Mayer said the Pioneer project is ``a different component'' of that
initiative.

  Mayer and Afran said an unnamed former employee of the AT&T unit provided
  them with evidence that the NSA approached the carrier with the proposed
  plan. Afran said he has seen the worker's log book and independently
  confirmed the source's participation in the project. He declined to
  identify the employee.

  Stop Suit

  On June 9, U.S. District Court Judge P. Kevin Castel in New York stopped
  the lawsuit from moving forward while the Federal Judicial Panel on
  Multidistrict Litigation in Washington rules on a U.S. request to assign
  all related telephone records lawsuits to a single judge.

  Robert Varettoni, a spokesman for Verizon, said he was unaware of the
  allegations against AT&T and declined to comment.

  Earlier this week, he issued a statement on behalf of the company that
  Verizon had not been asked by the NSA to provide customer phone records
  from either its hard-wired or wireless networks. Verizon also said that it
  couldn't confirm or deny ``whether it has any relationship to the
  classified NSA program.''

  Mayer's lawsuit was filed following a May 11 USA Today report that the U.S.
  government was using the NSA to monitor domestic telephone calls. Earlier
  today, USA Today said it couldn't confirm its contention that BellSouth or
  Verizon had contracts with the NSA to provide a database of domestic
  customer phone call records.

  Jeff Battcher, a spokesman for Atlanta-based BellSouth, said that
  vindicated the company.

  ``We never turned over any records to the NSA,'' he said in a telephone
  interview. ``We've been clear all along that they've never contacted us.
  Nobody in our company has ever had any contact with the NSA.''

  The case is McMurray v. Verizon Communications Inc., 06cv3650, in the
  Southern District of New York.


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  R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
  The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
  44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
  "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
  [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
  experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'