Wiretapping/phone records allegations update
There've been some developments in the past day or two that I haven't been able to get to. Let me see if I can round them up now:
- The president issued a memo on May 5 directing the National Intelligence Director, John Negroponte, to permit telcos to lie without legal penalty if necessary to protect issues of national security. This memo might, or might not, explain why all three telcos accused by USA Today of turning records over to the National Security Agency have denied doing so (but have not asked the newspaper for a correction). (My very quick, I-am-not-a-lawyer read on this is that it could provide the companies with immunity from SEC or shareholder lawsuits related to the withholding of material information from investors, but not from lawsuits over possible violations of the Electronic Communications Security Act. Whether I'm right or wrong, I imagine it opens a big ol' can of legal and ethical worms.)
- The New York Times has reported that the National Security Agency sought records on long-distance calls, but not local ones, under the program first described in USA Today. If true, this report makes some of the telcos' denials more understandable (particularly BellSouth), although I still wonder why they took so long to respond in depth to a potentially brand-destroying news report.
- Justin Rood at TPMmuckraker.com gets hold of a Washington Post reporter to nail down a discrepancy between the Post's account of how many National Security Letters -- administrative subpoenas -- the FBI had obtained and how many the Justice Department was saying the FBI had obtained. The Post's number, roughly 30,000, was about three times as high as Justice's number. The difference, Rood was able to clarify, was that Justice's number "does not include NSLs requesting 'subscriber information.' That's the identity of an individual associated with a phone number, an email or an IP address. The Justice report also excludes requests for information on foreigners ... " It's not clear what proportion of the gap is made up by each group, or whether there's any overlap (probably, I would think). But that means the FBI was getting not only call records but also identifying info on thousands of people, all of whom, by law, had to be considered suspects in terrorism or espionage for the NSL to have been issued in the first place. Are there really that many bona fide terrorism/espionage suspects in the U.S., or is something else going on here? I have no idea.
