Nachio Claims Violaton of FISA Started Immediately After dubya/ head Took Office

[boutons_]

Former CEO Says U.S. Punished Phone Firm

Qwest Feared NSA Plan Was Illegal, Filing Says
By Ellen Nakashima and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, October 13, 2007; A01


A former Qwest Communications International executive, appealing a conviction for insider trading, has alleged that the government withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after Qwest refused to participate in an unidentified National Security Agency program that the company thought might be illegal.

Former chief executive Joseph P. Nacchio, convicted in April of 19 counts of insider trading, said the NSA approached Qwest more than six months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to court do ents unsealed in Denver this week.

Details about the alleged NSA program have been redacted from the do ents, but Nacchio's lawyer said last year that the NSA had approached the company about participating in a warrantless surveillance program to gather information about Americans' phone records.

In the court filings disclosed this week, Nacchio suggests that Qwest's refusal to take part in that program led the government to cancel a separate, lucrative contract with the NSA in retribution. He is using the allegation to try to show why his stock sale should not have been considered improper.

Nacchio was convicted for selling shares of Qwest stock in early 2001, just before financial problems caused the company's share price to tumble. He has claimed in court papers that he had been optimistic that Qwest would overcome weak sales because of the expected top-secret contract with the government. Nacchio said he was forbidden to mention the specifics during the trial because of secrecy restrictions, but the judge ruled that the issue was irrelevant to the charges against him.

Nacchio's account, which places the NSA proposal at a meeting on Feb. 27, 2001, suggests that the Bush administration was seeking to enlist telecommunications firms in programs without court oversight before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The Sept. 11 attacks have been cited by the government as the main impetus for its warrantless surveillance efforts.

The allegations could affect the debate on Capitol Hill over whether telecoms sued for disclosing customers' phone records and other data to the government after the Sept. 11 attacks should be given legal immunity, even if they did not have court authorization to do so.

Spokesmen for the Justice Department, the NSA, the White House and the director of national intelligence declined to comment, citing the ongoing legal case against Nacchio and the classified nature of the NSA's activities. Federal filings in the appeal have not yet been disclosed.

In May 2006, USA Today reported that the NSA had been secretly collecting the phone-call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by major telecom firms. Qwest, it reported, declined to participate because of fears that the program lacked legal standing.

In a statement released after the story was published, 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."

Stern could not be reached for comment yesterday. Another lawyer for Nacchio, Jeffrey Speiser, declined to comment on whether the call-records program was the program discussed at the February 2001 meeting.

In a May 25, 2007, order, U.S. District Judge Edward W. Nottingham wrote that Nacchio has asserted that "Qwest entered into two classified contracts valued at hundreds of millions of dollars, without a compe ive bidding process and that in 2000 and 2001, he participated in discussion with high-ranking [redacted] representatives concerning the possibility of awarding additional contracts of a similar nature." He wrote, "Those discussions led him to believe that [redacted] would award Qwest contracts valued at amounts that would more than offset the negative warnings he was receiving about Qwest's financial prospects."

The newly released court do ents say that, on Feb. 27, 2001, Nacchio and James Payne, then Qwest's senior vice president of government systems, met with NSA officials at Fort Meade, expecting to discuss "Groundbreaker," a project to outsource the NSA's non-mission-critical systems.

The men came out of the meeting "with optimism about the prospect for 2001 revenue from NSA," according to an April 9, 2007, court filing by Nacchio's lawyers that was disclosed this week.

But the filing also claims that Nacchio "refused" to participate in some unidentified program or activity because it was possibly illegal and that the NSA later "expressed disappointment" about Qwest's decision.

"Nacchio said it was a legal issue and that they could not do something that 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," the filing said.

Mike German, policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the do ents show "that there is more to this story about the government's relationship with the telecoms than what the administration has admitted to."

Kurt Opsahl, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said: "It's inappropriate for the government to be awarding a contract conditioned upon an agreement to an illegal program. That truly is what's going on here."

The foundation has sued AT&T, charging that it violated privacy laws by cooperating with the government's warrantless surveillance program.

Staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/12/AR2007101202485.html?nav=hcmodule

================

So if it can be shown the dubya and head were after Americans' phone records in Feb 2001, 8 months before 9/11, and that other phone companies WERE co-operating, it means at least:

1) The Repgus were violating FISA occurred well before the Exec's claims the 9/11 justified it.

2) The Exec had access to phone records leading up to 9/11, and either didn't use the data to stop 9/11, or refused to use the data, allowing 9/11 to happen hrough NatSec incompetence and willful dereliction of duty (al Quaida was a "Clinton thing", Repugs don't do Clinton things)

This item is news because Nachio said Qwest refused. We can assume that other phone companies agreed to become accomlices in the Exec criminal spying and began indiscrimately vacuuming up the phone records of millions of Americans secretly, in advance of 9/11, violating FISA.

My bet is that Rove and other Repug hatchet men had (have?) access to the phone records. And that they could not only know which number was calling which number when, but could tap the voice contents.

The paranoia built into the Cons ution was, and is, fully justifiable and prescient. The dubya/ head Exec is vehemently, an hetically un-Cons utional and un-American.

[Winehole23]

Transit authority?

In 2007, a former Qwest executive, Joe Nacchio, who was being prosecuted for insider trading, alleged in court do ents that the NSA had asked Qwest to do something illegal in February 2001, but he had refused. It wasn’t clear what this was about, and it led to a lot of confused and confusing reporting, including speculation that the Bush administration had been trying to start its surveillance program (the New York Times had by then exposed the content component of Stellarwind, and USA Today had written a slightly garbled article about what now know to be the bulk phone metadata component) even before 9/11 — despite publicly justifying its program as a response to the terrorist attacks. Here is representative coverage from the time in Wired, The Washington Post, and my future colleagues at The New York Times; citing these articles in his endnotes, James Bamford later recycled some of these glimpsed-through-a-glass-darkly claims in what I believe to be an errant paragraph in his otherwise excellent book The Shadow Factory.



This reporting tended to project what we knew at the time about Stellarwind onto the vague words in Nacchio’s court filing. But the idea that Bush and the NSA were pushing this long before 9/11, indeed just a month after the change in administration, never really made any sense, and none of the post-Snowden revelations has corroborated that theory. The problem was that we did not have all the puzzle pieces to correctly identify what we were looking at. Now that we understand what transit authority is and its pre-9/11 history, a much simpler explanation presents itself, one that fits with, rather than contradicts, everything else we now know. Here is my endnote:

[Winehole23]

It involves the invention, late in the Reagan administration, of something called “transit authority.” This permits the NSA, on domestic soil and without a warrant, to collect foreign-to-foreign communications that are passing over the American network under the permissive rules of Executive Order 12333 surveillance – which permits bulk warrantless content and metadata collection – rather than the restrictive rules of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Pieces of that story are discernable in this fascinating memo from the Bush-Quayle administration. The memo was written by Mary Lawton, who was then the top intelligence lawyer in the Justice Department, to Dan Levin, then an official in the Office of the Deputy Attorney General charged with overseeing national-security matters. (Lawton died in 1993.)

http://www.charliesavage.com/?p=557

[Winehole23]

boutons' conclusions too simple by half, what a surprise

[boutons_deux]

boutons' conclusions too simple by half, what a surprise

Whine Hole, 9 ING YEARS LATER, feebly trying to go ex post facto on The Great Boutons.

9 years ago, my take was credibly ACCURATE on working assumptions (the police state will screw you if don't cooperate) and data back then.

[Winehole23]

well, you got it precisely wrong in the end -- which isn't so unusual.