AT&T Supports Terrorists and is a Threat to America

[WaTcHeR]

Spying Telecoms Receive Billions in Government Contracts

The telecoms who are being sued for their cooperation in the government's illegal warrantless surveillance program have received billions in government contracts. According to Washington Technology magazine, Verizon received $1.3 billion, Sprint $839 million and AT&T $505 million in federal prime contract revenue for fiscal 2007, for a total of $2.6 billion. While the companies have been government contractors for a long time, it still represents a significant increase in revenue.

Telecom apologists like to suggest that the communications companies' motivation was not financial. As Judge Walker noted when examining EFF's allegations of dragnet surveillance: "AT&T cannot seriously contend that a reasonable entity in its position could have believed that the alleged domestic dragnet was legal." Yet, the prospect of $2.6 billion per year can go a long way to explaining why an industry might cooperate with a program far outside the limitations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), despite the difficulty of believing it was legal.

Note that the numbers represent publicly available information for prime contracting only and do not include subcontracting revenue. Any monies paid for the secret NSA surveillance program would be in addition to the public contracting numbers.

According to former Qwest chief executive Joseph Nacchio "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." In light of these allegations and the vast sums awarded to the participating telecoms, before Congress votes on the pending FISA legislation or considers any form of immunity for the telecoms, it should hold thorough hearings, and find out if there was any quid pro quo.


http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/06/sp ... e-billions

[WaTcHeR]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - White House and congressional negotiators have reached a tentative agreement on an anti-terror spy bill that would permit court dismissal of potentially billions of dollars in lawsuits against phone companies, sources familiar with the talks said on Friday.

Under the possible accord, a federal court could immunize a company by ruling it had been given written assurances that its participation in the U.S. government's warrantless domestic spying program was legal and authorized by President George W. Bush, one source said.

It was unclear what would happen with suits against the government. But the government could claim state secrets, arguing information needed to prosecute was confidential and that suits should thus be dropped, the source said.

About 40 civil lawsuits have been filed accusing AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Sprint Nextel Corp. of violating Americans' privacy rights in the surveillance program begun by Bush shortly after the September 11 attacks.

"This is a terrible deal," said Caroline Fredrickson of the American Civil Liberties Union. "It's just a quick way to dismiss the cases. They (phone companies) just have to show that the president told them to break the law."

The White House and Democratic-led Congress have been trying for months to reach an agreement to modernize the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires the government receive secret-court approval to conduct surveillance on foreign targets in the United States.

Critics charge Bush violated the law in authorizing warrantless surveillance after the September 11 attacks. But Bush maintains he had the wartime power to do it. He later put the program under FISA jurisdiction. Terms remain secret.

As part of any law to update FISA, Bush has demanded retroactive immunity for any telephone company that participated in his spying program. Continued...

http://www.reuters.com/article/politics ... 0320080613

[WaTcHeR]

Congressmen That Are Traitors & A Danger To America

Less than 24 hours after introducing a controversial measure to expand President Bush's authority to spy on Americans, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives on Friday voted to approve the administration- and Republican-supported bill, sending it to the Senate where it will likely be adopted.

Civil liberties and privacy advocates forcefully panned the measure, which was crafted behind closed doors in negotiations among moderate Democrats, Republicans, the White House and telecommunications lobbyists.

"It’s Christmas morning at the White House thanks to this vote," Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office, said in a news release. "The House just wrapped up some expensive gifts for the administration and their buddies at the phone companies."

Friday's vote represented the beginning of the end in a legislative battle aimed at reining in the warrantless surveillance program Bush acknowledged instituting after 9/11.

"Immunity for telecom giants that secretly assisted in the NSA's warrantless surveillance undermines the rule of law and the privacy of every American," said Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "Congress should let the courts do their job instead of helping the administration and the phone companies avoid accountability for a half decade of illegal domestic spying. If this legislation passes the Senate and is signed into law, the American people will have lost their last best chance to discover the true scope of the president's wiretapping program and to determine whether or not the law was broken."

EFF is representing plaintiffs in more than 40 lawsuits alleging the telecoms broke the law and violated their customers' privacy by facilitating the warrantless wiretaps.

The House had earlier proved to be a bulwark in the way of the president's attempt to retroactively legalize his conduct and excuse from legal oversight the telecommunications companies that assisted him. That wall fell Friday.

[WaTcHeR]

The following Congressmen have trashed the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and are a danger to all Americans and should be removed from office at any cost. These congressmen are disgraceful, they have just entered the United States into a POLICE STATE. These Congressmen are not to be trusted, they have NO respect civil liberties. They are the ENEMY, they are the TERRORIST!


Congressman Ackerman
Congressman Aderholt
Congressman Akin
Congressman Alexander
Congressman Altmire
Congressman Arcuri
Congressman Baca
Congressman Bachmann
Congressman Bachus
Congressman Baird
Congressman Barrett (SC)
Congressman Barrow
Congressman Bartlett (MD)
Congressman Barton (TX)
Congressman Bean
Congressman Berkley
Congressman Berman
Congressman Berry
Congressman Biggert
Congressman Bilbray
Congressman Bilirakis
Congressman Bishop (GA)
Congressman Bishop (NY)
Congressman Bishop (UT)
Congressman Blackburn
Congressman Blunt
Congressman Boehner
Congressman Bonner
Congressman Bono Mack
Congressman Boozman
Congressman Boren
Congressman Boswell
Congressman Boucher
Congressman Boustany
Congressman Boyd (FL)
Congressman Boyda (KS)
Congressman Brady (TX)
Congressman Broun (GA)
Congressman Brown (SC)
Congressman Brown, Corrine
Congressman Buchanan
Congressman Burgess
Congressman Burton (IN)
Congressman Butterfield
Congressman Buyer
Congressman Calvert
Congressman Camp (MI)
Congressman Campbell (CA)
Congressman Cantor
Congressman Capito
Congressman Cardoza
Congressman Carney
Congressman Carter
Congressman Castle
Congressman Castor
Congressman Cazayoux
Congressman Chabot
Congressman Chandler
Congressman Childers
Congressman Cleaver
Congressman Clyburn
Congressman Coble
Congressman Cole (OK)
Congressman Conaway
Congressman Cooper
Congressman Costa
Congressman Cramer
Congressman Crenshaw
Congressman Crowley
Congressman Cubin
Congressman Cuellar
Congressman Culberson
Congressman Davis (AL)
Congressman Davis (KY)
Congressman Davis, David
Congressman Davis, Lincoln
Congressman Davis, Tom
Congressman Deal (GA)
Congressman Dent
Congressman Diaz-Balart, L.
Congressman Diaz-Balart, M.
Congressman Dicks
Congressman Donnelly
Congressman Doolittle
Congressman Drake
Congressman Dreier
Congressman Duncan
Congressman Edwards (TX)
Congressman Ehlers
Congressman Ellsworth
Congressman Emanuel
Congressman Emerson
Congressman Engel
Congressman English (PA)
Congressman Etheridge
Congressman Everett
Congressman Fallin
Congressman Feeney
Congressman Ferguson
Congressman Flake
Congressman Forbes
Congressman Fortenberry
Congressman Fossella
Congressman Foxx
Congressman Franks (AZ)
Congressman Frelinghuysen
CongressmanGallegly
Congressman Garrett (NJ)
Congressman Gerlach
Congressman Giffords
Congressman Gillibrand
Congressman Gingrey
Congressman Goode
Congressman Goodlatte
Congressman Gordon
Congressman Granger
Congressman Graves
Congressman Green, Al
Congressman Green, Gene
Congressman Gutierrez
Congressman Hall (TX)
Congressman Harman
Congressman Hastings (FL)
Congressman Hastings (WA)
Congressman Hayes
Congressman Heller
Congressman Hensarling
Congressman Herger
Congressman Herseth Sandlin
Congressman Higgins
Congressman Hinojosa
Congressman Hobson
Congressman Hoekstra
Congressman Holden
Congressman Hoyer
Congressman Hulshof
Congressman Hunter
Congressman Inglis (SC)
Congressman Issa
Congressman Johnson, Sam
Congressman Jordan
Congressman Kanjorski
Congressman Keller
Congressman Kildee
Congressman Kind
Congressman King (IA)
Congressman King (NY)
Congressman Kingston
Congressman Kirk
Congressman Klein (FL)
Congressman Kline (MN)
Congressman Knollenberg
Congressman Kuhl (NY)
Congressman LaHood
Congressman Lamborn
Congressman Lampson
Congressman Langevin
Congressman Latham
Congressman LaTourette
Congressman Latta
Congressman Lewis (CA)
Congressman Lewis (KY)
Congressman Linder
Congressman Lipinski
Congressman LoBiondo
Congressman Lowey
Congressman Lucas
Congressman Lungren, Daniel E.
Congressman Mack
Congressman Mahoney (FL)
Congressman Manzullo
Congressman Marchant
Congressman Marshall
Congressman Matheson
Congressman McCarthy (CA)
Congressman McCarthy (NY)
Congressman McCaul (TX)
Congressman McCotter
Congressman McCrery
Congressman McHenry
Congressman McHugh
Congressman McIntyre
Congressman McKeon
Congressman McMorris Rodgers
Congressman McNerney
Congressman Meeks (NY)
Congressman Melancon
Congressman Mica
Congressman Miller (FL)
Congressman Miller (MI)
Congressman Miller, Gary
Congressman Mitchell
Congressman Moore (KS)
Congressman Moran (KS)
Congressman Murphy, Patrick
Congressman Murphy, Tim
Congressman Murtha
Congressman Musgrave
Congressman Myrick
Congressman Neugebauer
Congressman Nunes
Congressman Ortiz
Congressman Pearce
Congressman Pelosi
Congressman Pence
Congressman Perlmutter
Congressman Peterson (MN)
Congressman Petri
Congressman Pickering
Congressman Pitts
Congressman Platts
Congressman Poe
Congressman Pomeroy
Congressman Porter
Congressman Price (GA)
Congressman Pryce (OH)
Congressman Putnam
Congressman Radanovich
Congressman Rahall
Congressman Ramstad
Congressman Regula
Congressman Rehberg
Congressman Reichert
Congressman Renzi
Congressman Reyes
Congressman Richardson
Congressman Rodriguez
Congressman Rogers (AL)
Congressman Rogers (KY)
Congressman Rogers (MI)
Congressman Rohrabacher
Congressman Ros-Lehtinen
Congressman Roskam
Congressman Ross
Congressman Royce
Congressman Ruppersberger
Congressman Ryan (WI)

Congressman Salazar
Congressman Sali
Congressman Saxton
Congressman Scalise
Congressman Schiff
Congressman Schmidt
Congressman Scott (GA)
Congressman Sensenbrenner
Congressman Sessions
Congressman Sestak
Congressman Shadegg
Congressman Shays
Congressman Sherman
Congressman Shimkus
Congressman Shuler
Congressman Shuster
Congressman Simpson
Congressman Sires
Congressman Skelton
Congressman Smith (NE)
Congressman Smith (NJ)
Congressman Smith (TX)
Congressman Smith (WA)
Congressman Snyder
Congressman Souder
Congressman Space
Congressman Spratt
Congressman Stearns
Congressman Stupak
Congressman Sullivan
Congressman Tancredo
Congressman Tanner
Congressman Tauscher
Congressman Taylor
Congressman Terry
Congressman Thompson (MS)
Congressman Thornberry
Congressman Tiberi
Congressman Turner
Congressman Udall (CO)
Congressman Upton
Congressman Walberg
Congressman Walden (OR)
Congressman Walsh (NY)
Congressman Wamp
Congressman Weldon (FL)
Congressman Westmoreland
Congressman Whitfield (KY)
Congressman Wilson (NM)
Congressman Wilson (OH)
Congressman Wilson (SC)
Congressman Wittman (VA)
Congressman Wolf
Congressman Yarmuth
Congressman Young (AK)
Congressman Young (FL)

[WaTcHeR]

Retired AT&T engineer Mark Klein has condemned the Senate’s Wednesday cloture vote on the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.

The bill, if passed by final vote planned for July 8, would revise the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to retroactively grant immunity to customers’ civil lawsuits against telecommunications companies who participated in the National Security Administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, on the condition that they can provide documentation that they were told ahead of time that their activities were legal.

Klein, in November 2007, urged Congress not to allow such immunity, having gone public with his story of a secret room in AT&T’s San Francisco switching center, which required NSA clearance to enter. All Internet traffic, he said, was being diverted to equipment in the room, as he discovered during his time maintaining optical splitters that handled data to and from AT&T customers.

“[My] thought was George Orwell’s 1984 and here I am forced to connect to the Big Brother machine,” Klein told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann in a November 2007 interview.

Documents Klein obtained, along with conversations he had with colleagues, suggested that 15 to 20 other sites such as this were in other offices across the country, ABC News reported. The documents, acquired by Wired.com, were submitted as part of a 2006 class action lawsuit, currently awaiting further action in the 9th Circuit US Appeals Court, filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“[Wednesday]’s vote by Congress effectively gives retroactive immunity to the telecom companies and endorses an all-powerful president,” Klein said. “It’s a Congressional coup against the Constitution.”

“This cynical deal is a Democratic exercise in deceit and cowardice,” he went on. “Congress has made the FISA law a dead letter–such a law is useless if the president can break it with impunity. Thus the Democrats have surreptitiously repudiated the main reform of the post-Watergate era and adopted Nixon’s line: ‘When the president does it that means that it is not illegal.’ This is the judicial logic of a dictatorship.”

http://rawstory.com/news08/2008/06/29/w ... te-agenda/

[WaTcHeR]

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo recently succeeding in pressuring AOL and AT&T to join the ranks of Verizon, Sprint, and Time Warner Cable in limiting access to many or all of the Usenet newsgroups hosted on their servers. This tactic will hinder free speech and the access to information in Usenet communities, without deterring the child pornographer. But since the ISPs are “voluntarily” bowing to political pressure, rather than obeying a statutory edict, traditional First Amendment court challenges are unlikely to protect these online communities.

Attorney General Cuomo has pressured these companies into censoring enormous amounts of First Amendment-protected material after an investigation found 88 groups containing child pornography, or 0.5% of the active discussion groups in the alt.* hierarchy. Verizon and Sprint are taking down one gigantic subset of groups, the very popular alt.* hierarchy, AT&T will block all alt.binaries.* groups, while Time Warner Cable and AOL are shutting down their Usenet service entirely. (link) California's Governor and Attorney General have jointly called on California's service providers to follow New York's initiative in "removing child pornography from existing servers and blocking channels that disseminate the illegal material."

Usenet is a technology that predates the birth of the World Wide Web. Similar to bulletin boards, it allows for conversation threads on a wide variety of topics. The alt.* hierarchy alone contains nearly 19,000 different groups. (link) Blocking the alt.* hierarchy, which is the largest and most active, predominantly censors innocent discussions in order to stop illicit activity in a handful of them. Examples of some of the groups that will no longer be available are alt.adoption, alt.culture, and even alt.horology (discussing the science of timekeeping). Blocking all of Usenet throws out even more legitimate and useful expressive speech.

Congress and the courts have struggled for more than 10 years to address the issue of "objectionable" Internet content, without a constitutionally permissible result. Two well-known attempts by Congress were the passage of the 1996 Communications Decency Act and the 1998 Child Online Protection Act. Both attempted to punish individuals who transmitted indecent material that was harmful to minors. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled these provisions unconstitutional because they block speech that would be protected by the First Amendment in contexts outside of the Internet. States have also attempted to preemptively censor material. In 2002, the Pennsylvania legislature attempted to hold ISPs criminally liable for child pornography available on the Internet. The Pennsylvania Attorney General was able to unilaterally and secretly order ISPs to block access to IP addresses suspected of containing child pornography, resulting in the blocking of many innocent sites (particularly when the same IP address was used to host a variety of websites). A state court soon struck down that law as unconstitutional for violating both due process and prior restraint of speech.

The censorship demanded by NY Attorney General Cuomo arbitrarily filters an entire electronic neighborhood due to the activities of a few of its residents. Measures already existed to take down objectionable material from Usenet. The kind of responsive enforcement that has been previously used balances free speech and the need to stop the dissemination of child pornography much better than the arbitrary, blanket ban to which the ISPs have agreed. Even so, the tactic will not stop committed child pornographers. ISPs are only blocking their own internal Usenet servers, access to Usenet groups on remote websites remains unblocked. As a result, these actions will do little to stop the threat they are intended to prevent. (link)

Because imposed online censorship inevitably goes to far and has never been upheld in the courts, it is not surprising that Attorney General Cuomo chose to apply political rather than legal pressure to the ISPs. While Internet users have First Amendment rights to speech and expression online, ISPs also have a First Amendment right not to carry content that they do not want to promote. To the extent the filtering program is “voluntary”, it is not the government censoring Usenet or the ISPs, but the ISPs choosing what speech they want to carry. Still, ISPs offer the critical public service of providing people with access to the prosperity of information available online. They have an obligation to consider the effects of their censorship on innocent material, and not just the political expediency of accommodating the Attorney General’s request. The heavy-handed approach of shutting down an entire online service is the least efficient and effective way to accomplish their legitimate goal. Usenet is a communication protocol, no different from Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which makes the Web possible. Although the Web is also plagued by some amount of objectionable material, no one would remotely consider blocking access to the entire internet an appropriate solution. ISPs should not take advantage of the relatively small size of the Usenet community to deny their customers access to the diverse forms that content can take on digital networks.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/07/mo ... newsgroups




Keywords: AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T SUCKS AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T AT&T

[WaTcHeR]

The following list of people are Terrorists, they are traitors to America. They have no respect for the American Constitution, they are destroying America and they need to be stopped.

Senator Alexander (R-TN)
Senator Allard (R-CO)
Senator Barrasso (R-WY)
Senator Baucus (D-MT)
Senator Bayh (D-IN)
Senator Bennett (R-UT)
Senator Bond (R-MO)
Senator Brownback (R-KS)
Senator Bunning (R-KY)
Senator Burr (R-NC)
Senator Carper (D-DE)
Senator Casey (D-PA)
Senator Chambliss (R-GA)
Senator Coburn (R-OK)
Senator Cochran (R-MS)
Senator Coleman (R-MN)
Senator Collins (R-ME)
Senator Conrad (D-ND)
Senator Corker (R-TN)
Senator Cornyn (R-TX)
Senator Craig (R-ID)
Senator Crapo (R-ID)
Senator DeMint (R-SC)
Senator Dole (R-NC)
Senator Domenici (R-NM)
Senator Ensign (R-NV)
Senator Enzi (R-WY)
Senator Feinstein (D-CA)
Senator Graham (R-SC)
Senator Grassley (R-IA)
Senator Gregg (R-NH)
Senator Hagel (R-NE)
Senator Hatch (R-UT)
Senator Hutchison (R-TX)
Senator Inhofe (R-OK)
Senator Inouye (D-HI)
Senator Isakson (R-GA)
Senator Johnson (D-SD)
Senator Kohl (D-WI)
Senator Kyl (R-AZ)
Senator Landrieu (D-LA)
Senator Lieberman (ID-CT)
Senator Lincoln (D-AR)
Senator Lugar (R-IN)
Senator Martinez (R-FL)
Senator McCaskill (D-MO)
Senator McConnell (R-KY)
Senator Mikulski (D-MD)
Senator Murkowski (R-AK)
Senator Nelson (D-FL)
Senator Nelson (D-NE)
Senator Obama (D-IL)
Senator Pryor (D-AR)
Senator Roberts (R-KS)
Senator Rockefeller (D-WV)
Senator Salazar (D-CO)
Senator Shelby (R-AL)
Senator Smith (R-OR)
Senator Snowe (R-ME)
Senator Specter (R-PA)
Senator Stevens (R-AK)
Senator Sununu (R-NH)
Senator Thune (R-SD)
Senator Vitter (R-LA)
Senator Voinovich (R-OH)
Senator Warner (R-VA)
Senator Webb (D-VA)
Senator Whitehouse (D-RI)
Senator Wicker (R-MS)

[WaTcHeR]

Senate commits to shielding telecoms from suits

WASHINGTON - The Senate on Wednesday affirmed its intention to protect from civil lawsuits telecom companies that helped the government wiretap Americans without court authorization after the Sept. 11 attacks.

It turned back three amendments that were offered during final debate on a bill that overhauls the rules on secret government eavesdropping.

The votes suggest the surveillance bill will pass by an easy margin later Wednesday, and signal an end to almost a year of wrangling between the House and Senate, Democrats and Republicans, and Congress and the White House over the president's warrantless wiretapping program.

The House approved the surveillance overhaul last month.

The long fight on Capitol Hill has centered on one question: whether to shield from civil lawsuits telecommunications companies that helped the government eavesdrop on American phone and computer lines after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, without the permission or knowledge of a secret court created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The lawsuits allege that the White House and the companies violated U.S. law by going around the FISA court to start the wiretaps. The court was created 30 years ago to prevent the government from abusing its surveillance powers for political purposes, as was done in the Vietnam War and Watergate eras. The court is meant to approve all wiretaps placed inside the U.S. for intelligence-gathering purposes. The law has been interpreted to include international e-mail records stored on servers inside the U.S.

"This president broke the law," said Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis.

The Bush administration brought the wiretapping back under the FISA court's authority only after The New York Times revealed the existence of the program. A handful of members of Congress knew about the program from top secret briefings. Most members are still forbidden to know the details of the classified program, and some object that they are being asked to grant immunity to the telecoms without first knowing what they did.

The White House had threatened to veto the bill unless it immunized companies like AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., from wiretapping lawsuits. About 40 such lawsuits have been filed. They are all pending before a single federal district court.

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., compared the senate vote on immunity to buying a "pig in a poke."

Opponents to immunity argue that only in court will the full extent of the program be understood, and only a judge should decide whether the program broke the law.

Just under a third of the Senate, including presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, supported an amendment proposed by Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., that would have stripped immunity from the bill. It was defeated on a 32-66 vote. Presumptive Republican nominee John McCain did not vote.

Specter proposed an amendment to require a district court judge to assess the legality of warrantless wiretapping before granting immunity. It failed on a 37-61 vote.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., proposed that immunity be delayed until after a yearlong government investigation into warrantless wiretapping is completed. His amendment failed on a vote of 42-56.

The bill tries to address concerns about the warrantless wiretapping program by requiring inspectors general inside the government to conduct a yearlong investigation into the program.

The new surveillance bill also sets new rules for government eavesdropping. Some of them would tighten the reins on current government surveillance activities, and others loosen them compared with a law passed 30 years ago.

For example, it would require the government to get FISA court approval before it eavesdrops on an American overseas. Currently, the attorney general approves that category of electronic surveillance on his own.

But the bill also would allow the government to obtain broad, yearlong intercept orders from the FISA court that target foreign groups and people, raising the prospect that communications with innocent Americans would be swept up. The court would approve how the government chooses the targets, and how the intercepted American communications are to be protected.

The original FISA law required the government to get wiretapping warrants for each individual targeted from inside the United States, on the rationale that most communications inside the U.S. would involve Americans whose civil liberties must be protected. But technology has changed. Purely foreign communications increasingly pass through U.S. wires and sit on American computer servers, and the law required court orders be obtained to access those as well.

The bill would give the government a week to conduct a wiretap in an emergency before it must apply for a court order. The original law only allowed three days.

The bill restates that the FISA law is the only means by which wiretapping for intelligence purposes can be conducted inside the United States. This is meant to prevent a repeat of warrantless wiretapping by future administrations.

The bill is very much a political compromise reached against a deadline: Yearlong wiretapping orders authorized by Congress last year will begin to expire in August. Without a new bill, the government would go back to old FISA rules, requiring multiple new orders and potential delays to continue those intercepts, something most of Congress did not want to see happen, particularly in an election year.

The list of terrorists:

Senator Alexander (R-TN)
Senator Allard (R-CO)
Senator Barrasso (R-WY)
Senator Baucus (D-MT)
Senator Bayh (D-IN)
Senator Bennett (R-UT)
Senator Bond (R-MO)
Senator Brownback (R-KS)
Senator Bunning (R-KY)
Senator Burr (R-NC)
Senator Carper (D-DE)
Senator Casey (D-PA)
Senator Chambliss (R-GA)
Senator Coburn (R-OK)
Senator Cochran (R-MS)
Senator Coleman (R-MN)
Senator Collins (R-ME)
Senator Conrad (D-ND)
Senator Corker (R-TN)
Senator Cornyn (R-TX)
Senator Craig (R-ID)
Senator Crapo (R-ID)
Senator DeMint (R-SC)
Senator Dole (R-NC)
Senator Domenici (R-NM)
Senator Ensign (R-NV)
Senator Enzi (R-WY)
Senator Feinstein (D-CA)
Senator Graham (R-SC)
Senator Grassley (R-IA)
Senator Gregg (R-NH)
Senator Hagel (R-NE)
Senator Hatch (R-UT)
Senator Hutchison (R-TX)
Senator Inhofe (R-OK)
Senator Inouye (D-HI)
Senator Isakson (R-GA)
Senator Johnson (D-SD)
Senator Kohl (D-WI)
Senator Kyl (R-AZ)
Senator Landrieu (D-LA)
Senator Lieberman (ID-CT)
Senator Lincoln (D-AR)
Senator Lugar (R-IN)
Senator Martinez (R-FL)
Senator McCaskill (D-MO)
Senator McConnell (R-KY)
Senator Mikulski (D-MD)
Senator Murkowski (R-AK)
Senator Nelson (D-FL)
Senator Nelson (D-NE)
Senator Obama (D-IL)
Senator Pryor (D-AR)
Senator Roberts (R-KS)
Senator Rockefeller (D-WV)
Senator Salazar (D-CO)
Senator Shelby (R-AL)
Senator Smith (R-OR)
Senator Snowe (R-ME)
Senator Specter (R-PA)
Senator Stevens (R-AK)
Senator Sununu (R-NH)
Senator Thune (R-SD)
Senator Vitter (R-LA)
Senator Voinovich (R-OH)
Senator Warner (R-VA)
Senator Webb (D-VA)
Senator Whitehouse (D-RI)
Senator Wicker (R-MS)

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id ... _article=1

[WaTcHeR]

Stop the new FISA - Allowing the new surveillance law to stand would seriously cripple our free press.

If the sweeping surveillance law signed by President Bush on Thursday -- giving the U.S. government nearly unchecked authority to eavesdrop on the phone calls and e-mails of innocent Americans -- is allowed to stand, we will have eroded one of the most important bulwarks to a free press and an open society.

The new FISA Amendments Act nearly eviscerates oversight of government surveillance. It allows the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to review only general procedures for spying rather than individual warrants. The court will not be told specifics about who will be wiretapped, which means the law provides woefully inadequate safeguards to protect innocent people whose communications are caught up in the government's dragnet surveillance program.

The law, passed under the guise of national security, ostensibly targets people outside the country. There is no question, however, that it will ensnare many communications between Americans and those overseas. Those communications can be stored indefinitely and disseminated, not just to the U.S. government but to other governments.

This law will cripple the work of those of us who as reporters communicate regularly with people overseas, especially those in the Middle East. It will intimidate dissidents, human rights activists and courageous officials who seek to expose the lies of our government or governments allied with ours. It will hang like the sword of Damocles over all who dare to defy the official versions of events. It leaves open the possibility of retribution and invites the potential for abuse by those whose concern is not with national security but with the consolidation of their own power.

I have joined an ACLU lawsuit challenging the new law along with other journalists, human rights organizations and defense attorneys who also rely on confidentiality to do their work. I have joined not only because this law takes aim at my work but because I believe it signals a serious erosion of safeguards that make possible our democratic state. Laws and their just application are the only protection we have as citizens. Once the law is changed to permit the impermissible, we have no recourse with which to fight back.

I spent nearly 20 years as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, as well as other news organizations. I covered the conflict in the Middle East for seven years. I have friends and colleagues in Jerusalem, Gaza, Cairo, Damascus, Tehran, Baghdad and Beirut. I could easily be one of those innocent Americans who are spied on under the government's new surveillance authority.

The reach of such surveillance has already hampered my work. I was once told about a showdown between a U.S. warship and the Iranian navy that had the potential to escalate into a military conflict. I contacted someone who was on the ship at the time of the alleged incident and who reportedly had photos. His first question was whether my phone and e-mails were being monitored.

What could I say? How could I know? I offered to travel to see him but, frightened of retribution, he refused. I do not know if the man's story is true. I only know that the fear of surveillance made it impossible for me to determine its veracity. Under this law, all those who hold information that could embarrass and expose the lies of those in power will have similar fears. Confidentiality, and the understanding that as a reporter I will honor this confidentiality, permits a free press to function. Take it away and a free press withers and dies.

I know the cost of terrorism and the consequences of war. I have investigated Al Qaeda's operation in Europe and have covered numerous conflicts. The monitoring of suspected terrorists, with proper oversight, is a crucial part of our national security. But this law is not about keeping us safe, which can -- and should -- be done in a constitutional manner and with judicial oversight. It is about using terrorism as a pretext to permit wholesale spying and to silence voices that will allow us to maintain an open society.

Chris Hedges was part of the team of New York Times reporters who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for reporting on global terrorism. He is the author of many books, including "War Is the Force that Gives Us Meaning."


http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/com ... 7129.story

[WaTcHeR]

Ex-NYT correspondent: FISA update is 'giant step toward fascism'

For more than 20 years, Chris Hedges reported from around the globe as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times and other outlets, working from countries with little to no respect for a free and independent press, where his phone was bugged and he was trailed by government agents to prevent dissidents and whistle-blowers from speaking to him.

Now, with the adoption of a sweeping new surveillance law, the United States may become one of those countries, Hedges says.

Hedges is one of more than a dozen plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the US government brought by the American Civil Liberties Union that seeks to scuttle an update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act signed by President Bush Thursday. The ACLU says the FISA update allows the government to engage in massive, unconstitutional dragnet surveillance of Americans' phone calls and e-mails with anyone abroad.

During a conference call Thursday, Hedges recounted his work in foreign countries like the former Yugoslavia and El Salvador where his phone was bugged and government agents regularly followed him to prevent critics from speaking out. Now the same thing is beginning to happen here, he said.

"I have little doubt the passing of this FISA law essentially brings that type of surveillance system and the effectiveness of that system to the United States," he said.

According to the ACLU, the Democratic-controlled Congress has handed Bush a gift-wrapped grant of new domestic spying authority. The group says its lawsuit is perhaps the last chance to sustain Americans' confidence that a government snoop isn't listening in on every one of their international calls.

"This lawsuit is the ACLU at its best," said journalist and author Naomi Klein, another plaintiff in the suit. "It's defending the law even when the lawmakers won't"

The ACLU is representing journalists, human rights activists, lawyers and others whose jobs are likely to put them in contact with people overseas.

Klein and Hedges said the already-difficult task of gathering information from dissidents and whistle-blowers in the US and abroad would be made even more difficult with the draconian rules and lax oversight governing surveillance inherent in the FISA update.
Wiretap suspicion silenced whistle-blower on alleged Iran showdown

Hedges, who now writes books and currently contributes to The Nation and other publications, recalled receiving a tip about an alleged confrontation between a US Navy warship and an Iranian military vessel in Iranian waters that nearly escalated into an act of war. Hedges said he was given the name of a US Navy source who supposedly had witnessed the event. When he reached out to the official, Hedges was asked to provide assurances that he wasn't being monitored, which he couldn't provide, he said, because of his frequent contact with sources overseas. The source immediately cut off communication, the reporter was never able to confirm the story.

Hedges didn't know for sure that he was being monitored, but he couldn't say for sure that he wasn't. The chilling effect of surveillance he had become so familiar with while reporting in foreign countries had now scuttled his work at home.

"With that gone we take a giant step toward fascism," Hedges said during the call.

What's the difference between the parameters of the just-passed law and the National Security Agency's pre-existing ability to listen to foreigners' phone calls abroad with no oversight (ie, the NSA was always able to listen to calls, say, between Colombia and Venezuela without warrants)? Hedges explained that the new law made it more easy for Americans to get caught up in the NSA's dragnet if they make any calls abroad; for example, he said, his Navy source was based in the US but still could not be assured that their conversations were not being monitored.

"It essentially obliterates what kinds of protections we had working within our own borders," Hedges said in response to a question from RAW STORY.

The ACLU hopes the US District Court for the Southern District of New York will agree that the FISA update is unconstitutional and throw it out, forcing the nation's spies, especially those at the National Security Agency, to revert to standards of the pre-update FISA law, which first passed in 1978 and has been modified several times over the years to account for technology changes.

The lawsuit argues that plaintiffs like Hedges and Klein along with organizations like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Service Employees International Union have suffered irreparable harm from the newest statute, which does not require the NSA to get individual court warrants before intercepting conversations between the US and another country, as long as they are not specifically targeting an American.

“The new law allows the mass acquisition of Americans’ international e-mails and telephone calls,” said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU's National Security Project. “The administration has argued that the law is necessary to address the threat of terrorism, but the truth is that the law sweeps much more broadly and implicates all kinds of communications that have nothing to do with terrorism or criminal activity of any kind.”

The ACLU introduced a similar lawsuit after the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program became public in December 2005. President Bush said he authorized the super-secret agency to eavesdrop without court approval beginning after Sept. 11, 2001, in what he dubbed his "Terrorist Surveillance Program."

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out that lawsuit on the grounds that the journalists, activists and lawyers the ACLU was representing that time around did not have standing to sue the government because they could not prove their communications were intercepted in the highly classified program. The Supreme Court refused to hear the ACLU's appeal in that case, essentially rendering the case moot.

This time around, the ACLU hopes to have a better shot because its suit is based on language within a public law, rather than a secret program whose details only emerged in news reports, Jaffer said during Thursday's conference call.

Furthermore, the ACLU maintains that the Sixth Circuit was wrong in dismissing its case; filing their latest case in New York, which is part of the Second Circuit, gives another court an opportunity to consider the FISA issues.

In addition to its District Court lawsuit, the ACLU also asked the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret body that considers FISA-related matters, to make any of its opinions on the scope, meaning or constitutionality of the new law as open to the public as possible.

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/ACLU_laws ... _0710.html

[WaTcHeR]

On Wednesday, Antifascist Calling reported on moves by the Department of Justice to seek blanket immunity for AT&T under provisions of the disgraceful FISA Amendments Act (FAA).

If approved by Judge Vaughn Walker, the presiding magistrate hearing the landmark Hepting v. AT&T lawsuit in federal district court in San Francisco, the giant telecommunications corporation and Bush crime family partner would walk away scott free.

The suit, brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on behalf of AT&T customers caught up in the state’s illegal internet and telephone driftnet surveillance, is challenging unconstitutional spying on U.S. citizens and legal residents.

The shocking extent of the "public-private partnership" in political repression was first revealed in depth when former AT&T technician Mark Klein filed an affidavit in support of EFF’s contention that AT&T had systematically violated their customers’ right to privacy.

As Antifascist Calling has previously reported on many occasions, the telecommunications giant had constructed a secret room (SG3 Secure Room, room number 641A) for the exclusive use of the National Security Agency’s spying operations at AT&T’s Folsom St. office.

On Saturday, EFF reported that the government "started the formal process for retroactive immunity for the telecommunications companies sued by EFF and others for their involvement in the warrantless surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans." That hearing is set for December 2, 2008 in San Francisco.

The state filed a secret "certification" by U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey with the court along with a public submission of its claim of limitless executive power "during a time of war."

However in a bold, preemptive move on Thursday, EFF filed a new lawsuit against the government. That suit, Jewel v. NSA, targets the National Security Agency, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Cheney’s sinister chief of staff, David Addington, and former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Filed "on behalf of AT&T customers," the civil rights organization has opened a new front against the government and their corporate partners. EFF declared:

The lawsuit, Jewel v. NSA, is aimed at ending the NSA’s dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans and holding accountable the government officials who illegally authorized it. Evidence in the case includes undisputed documents provided by former AT&T telecommunications technician Mark Klein showing AT&T has routed copies of Internet traffic to a secret room in San Francisco controlled by the NSA. ("EFF Sues NSA, President Bush and Vice President Cheney to Stop Illegal Surveillance," Electronic Frontier Foundation, Press Release, September 18, 2008)

As in Hepting v. AT&T, the identical evidence of gross malfeasance on the part of well-heeled corporate lawbreakers who acted in concert with unaccountable secret state agencies, is central to Jewel v. NSA.

These covert intelligence operations arose as the result of secret Department of Justice memorandums written by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). According to an unsigned and undated memo released by by the OLC, the Justice Department claims that President Bush has an "inherent right" to carry out "communications intelligence targeted at the enemy." Indeed, as the extent of these illegal programs have revealed, the "enemy" is none other than the American people themselves!

A January 19, 2006 Justice Department White Paper, Legal Authority Supporting the Activities of the NSA Described by President Bush, states:

The NSA’s activities are supported by the President’s well-recognized inherent constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and sole organ for the Nation in foreign affairs to conduct warrantless surveillance of enemy forces for intelligence purposes to detect and disrupt armed attacks on the United States.

Under color of the dubious theory of the "unitary executive," propounded by ultra-rightist outfits such as the Federalist Society, Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights are flagrantly–and illegally–violated on a daily basis by the Bush administration. Such specious assertions represent nothing less than an open declaration of war on our rights and the framework for a limitless presidential dictatorship.

Senior EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston commenting on the intent of Jewel v. NSA averred,

"In addition to suing AT&T, we’ve now opened a second front in the battle to stop the NSA’s illegal surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans and hold personally responsible those who authorized or participated in the spying program. For years, the NSA has been engaged in a massive and massively illegal fishing expedition through AT&T’s domestic networks and databases of customer records. Our goal in this new case against the government, as in our case against AT&T, is to dismantle this dragnet surveillance program as soon as possible."

By targeting the individuals responsible for these illegal programs, EFF intends to bring these felons to justice by holding them accountable for the destruction of our constitutional rights. The Fourth Amendment states in plain and simple language:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

But in a perverse interpretation of the constitutional separation of powers, Bushist minions such as torture-enabler John C. Yoo, formerly an attorney with the DoJ’s Office of Legal Counsel and currently a tenured professor at the University of California’s Boalt Hall Law School, stated publicly that the President, in his role as "Commander-in-Chief," has the authority to bypass, indeed subvert, laws passed by Congress.

Under this novel interpretation of the Constitution, the President has the right under the theory of the "unitary executive" to grab unlimited executive power to conduct foreign and domestic policy as he sees fit.

As limited as the Watergate-era Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was, it represented an attempt by Congress after Nixon’s resignation to curtail unchecked Executive branch surveillance of domestic dissidents under color of "national security." Indeed, Nixon’s blatant and illegal surveillance of his political opponents was included in Article 2 of the impeachment articles against him.

In the view of miscreants such as Cheney, Addington and Yoo, congressional limitations on the president’s power are "unconstitutional" maneuvers meant to strip the Chief Executive of his rightful power to act as he–and the corporatists setting policy–see fit. Under their reading, the Executive, particularly in his role as "Commander-in-Chief," must interpret laws on an equal footing with the courts, if he is to perform his "wartime" function. However, no such provision exists in the U.S. Constitution and in fact, the "unitary executive" is a fantasy.

Since 1803, U.S. constitutional tradition has recognized that the courts wield what Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall called "judicial supremacy," that is, the court is the final arbiter of what is and what is not the law. Bushist ideologues stand this principle on its head and transform a society based on law into a "managed democracy" predicated on the whims of corporations and the men who wield executive power in their "unitary" interests.

If such flagrant violations of democratic and republican norms go unchecked–either by the coequal branches of government or salutary direct action by the people themselves, the rights of citizens to determine the fundamental nature of society is replaced by a Führerprinzip, that is to say, a "leader principle" rooted in an antidemocratic hierarchy of warlords that resemble the military structures of the Nazi Party. In other words, a high-tech, panoptic police state.

Since September 11, 2001, the United States Government has launched systematic assaults against the constitutional rights of American citizens and legal residents. As the illegal aggression against the people of Iraq has revealed in all its ghastly horror, the "war on terror" is a war of terror against anyone who would challenge U.S. imperialism’s claim to be undisputed "masters of the universe."

From warrantless wiretapping to torture, from preemptive wars of aggression and conquest to the plunder of the environment on behalf of corporate "friends," and from indefinite detention of "enemy combatants" to secretive plans for martial law, the Bush administration and their congressional enablers in both capitalist political parties demonstrate on a daily basis that the greatest threat to the American people comes, not from foreign terrorists or Islamic jihadists, but from neofascist fundamentalists here at home.


http://www.infowars.com/?p=4745

[WaTcHeR]

Chief Judge Vaughn Walker of the Northern District of California federal court asked for further briefing on a key constitutional question in the litigations brought against AT&T and the other telecommunications carriers for their involvement in the NSA's warrantless wiretapping. The Court noted that the FISA Amendments Act, the law passed by Congress last summer that allows the Attorney General to seek retroactive and prospective immunity for the telecommunications carriers, appears to contain "literally no guidance for the exercise of discretion" by the Attorney General in invoking the immunity provisions. This issue was raised by EFF and the other attorneys representing the customers of the major telecommunications companies in attacking the statute as unconstitutional. The Constitution forbids Congress from writing laws that grant unlimited discretion to the Executive Branch.

EFF will be spearheading the response on behalf of the customers of AT&T and the other carriers. Responding to this Order will give the Obama Administration its first chance to reevaluate the extreme positions taken by the Bush Administration in the telecom warrantless wiretapping cases and we hope that Attorney General Holder will use it to chart a course that is more consistent with both the Constitution and the rule of law than his predecessor. The supplemental briefs from both sides are due February 25, 2009.


http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/02/ju ... nality-tel

[WaTcHeR]

1. They are liars, and horrible at lying. The new AT&T was founded in 1983 as Southwestern Bell Corporation. In 1995, they announced they would be changing their name to SBC Communications, Inc. in a move to improve their global image and reach. Then they claimed that not only was SBC? not an acronym for Southwestern Bell Corporation, but that it didnt stand for anything at all. Oh, that makes sense.

2. They lied to the FCC and American people about allowing competitors to have access to their markets. They told the FCC that they would allow competitors to have access to local markets where SBC (AT&T) had a monopoly if the FCC would approve their acquisition of Ameritech. The FCC agreed, and gave SBC monopolies in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Then, SBC broke their promise and never allowed any competition in all five states.

3. They lied again, and stole American taxpayer money. In the early 1990's, SBC and the other major telecommunications companies (Verizon, BellSouth and Qwest) made promises to upgrade the internet infrastructure of the United States with fiber optics by 2006. For this task, they were given $200 billion in taxpayer money by the Clinton administration. Instead of doing what they said, they pocketed most of the money and used the rest to build copper wiring for near-term profits from ADSL.

Now, the United States broadband speed ranking is, at best, 16th in the world, and the major telecom companies are complaining about not having enough money to upgrade. Their solution? Charge everybody more money; forget net neutrality.

4. AT&T is the United States second largest donor to political campaigns. Since 1990, they have contributed more than $36 million to both Republicans and Democrats. Their most important political issue now? Winning the right to profit by providing broadband internet access.

5. AT&T allows the National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor its customers communications without warrants. This violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution of the United States. AT&T still has neither confirmed nor denied this. Are they hiding something? You decide.

6. In 2006, AT&T handed all of their international and domestic calling records over to the NSA. This was done in order to create a massive calling database.

7. Then they rewrote the rules on their privacy policy. The policy says that, “AT&T” not customers owns customers confidential info and can use it ‘to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process.’ “

8. Finally, there is only one provider you can use if you want to use the Apple iPhone. Can you guess who it is? I'll give you a hint:

AT&T

[WaTcHeR]

FBI Defends Disruptive Raids on Texas Data Centers

The FBI on Tuesday defended its raids on at least two data centers in Texas, in which agents carted out equipment and disrupted service to hundreds of businesses.

The raids were part of an investigation prompted by complaints from AT&T and Verizon about unpaid bills allegedly owed by some data center customers, according to court records. One data center owner charges that the telecoms are using the FBI to collect debts that should be resolved in civil court. But on Tuesday, an FBI spokesman disputed that charge.

"We wouldn’t be looking at it if it was a civil matter," says Mark White, spokesman for the FBI’s Dallas office. "And a judge wouldn’t sign a federal search warrant if there wasn’t probable cause to believe that a fraud took place and that the equipment we asked to seize had evidence pertaining to the criminal violation."

In interviews with Threat Level, companies affected by the raids say they’ve lost millions of dollars in equipment and business after the FBI hauled off gear belonging to phone and VoIP providers, a credit card processing company and other businesses that housed equipment at the centers. Nobody has been charged in the FBI’s investigation.

According to the owner of one co-location facility, Crydon Technology, which was raided on March 12, FBI agents seized about 220 servers belonging to him and his customers, as well as routers, switches, cabinets for storing servers and even power strips. Authorities also raided his home, where they seized eight iPods, some belonging to his three children, five XBoxes, a PlayStation3 system and a Wii gaming console, among other equipment. Agents also seized about $200,000 from the owner’s business accounts, $1,000 from his teenage daughter’s account and more than $10,000 in a personal bank account belonging to the elderly mother of his former comptroller.

Mike Faulkner, owner of Crydon, says the seizure has resulted in him losing millions of dollars in revenue. It’s also put many of his customers out of business or at risk of closure.

The raids are the result of complaints filed by AT&T and Verizon about small VoIP service providers whom the telecoms say owe them money for connectivity services. But instead of focusing the raid on those companies, Faulkner and others say the FBI vacuumed up equipment and data belonging to hundreds of unrelated businesses.

In addition to Crydon, the data center of Core IP Networks was raided last week. Customers who went to Core IP to try to retrieve their equipment were threatened with arrest, according to an announcement posted online by the company’s CEO, Matthew Simpson. According to Simpson, the FBI is investigating a company that purchased services from Core IP in the past but had never co-located equipment at Core IP’s address. Simpson reported that 50 businesses lost access to their e-mail and data as a result of the raid. Some of those clients are phone companies, and the loss of their equipment has meant that some of their customers lost emergency 911 access.

"If you run a data center, please be aware that in our great country, the FBI can come into your place of business at any time and take whatever they want, with no reason," Simpson wrote.

Faulkner says the FBI seized about $2.5 million from Simpson’s personal bank account. Simpson did not respond to a request for comment.

Faulkner and others say that the FBI agent who led the raid, Special Agent Allyn Lynd from the Dallas field office, warned them not to discuss the raid with each other or with the press.

But a 39-page affidavit (.pdf) related to the Crydon raid provides a convoluted account of the investigation. It alleges that a number of conspirators, some of who may have connections to Faulkner, conspired to obtain agreements from AT&T and Verizon to purchase connectivity services with the telecoms. Several documents used to provide proof of business ownership and financial stability were forged, according to the affidavit. For example, the affidavit claims that one of the conspirators named Ronald Northern sent AT&T a bill from Verizon to show that he had a history of paying for services on time. The bill was allegedly forged with Verizon’s logo — which the company is claiming is a trademark infringement — and that the corporation number the conspirator used actually belonged to a different Verizon customer.

Northern could not be reached for comment.

The affidavit claims that Faulkner, Northern and others committed mail and wire fraud, criminal e-mail abuse (stemming from separate allegations of spamming), criminal copyright infringement and criminal use of fraudulent documents. The affidavit mentions several companies that Faulkner has been connected to including, Crydon, Premier Voice and Union Datacom.

But mixed in with these allegations is a separate tale that hints at the larger story behind the raid. AT&T and Verizon say they’re owed about $6 million in fees from VoIP service providers who used servers that were co-located at Crydon and the other data centers. The telecoms claim that these VoIP providers used up more than 120 million "physical connectivity minutes" without paying for them, and that attempts by AT&T and Verizon to collect on the debts proved fruitless.

"Based on my investigation and that of AT&T and Verizon," writes Special Agent Lynd in the affidavit, "I believe individuals associated with Lonestar Power and Premier Voice defrauded AT&T and Verizon out of hundreds of millions of minutes of physical connectivity service and significant revenue by means of the submission of false/fraudulent credit information and other false representations."

Faulkner, who was a part owner of Premier Voice before selling it about a year ago, acknowledges that Premier owed money to AT&T at one time — though he says he’s not certain it was for interconnection. He says that debt was assumed by the new owner when he sold the company. Either way, he says, this would be categorized as corporate debt, not fraud.

"There’s a big difference between stealing money and owing money," he says.

He says he often invests in troubled companies that are carrying debt when he buys them.

"Usually you settle the debt," he says. "But AT&T never contacted me about owing money. Verizon never contacted me."

Faulkner says the two telecoms have used the FBI to seize equipment to obtain evidence through a criminal investigation instead of pursuing the companies through civil litigation and the discovery process. And instead of targeting the investigation specifically at the VoIP companies, he says the FBI swept in everyone who had servers in the same place where the VoIP servers were located. As a result, all of Crydon Technology’s equipment was seized, as was the equipment of numerous businesses that had the bad luck to own servers running out of Crydon’s facility.

"They’re destroying more and more customers and it just doesn’t seem to make sense," Faulkner says. "They’ve done a horrible amount of damage and have been so barbaric in the way they’ve shut things down. If they just picked some random guy off the street to do this investigation, he could have done a better job than the FBI did."

Among more than 300 businesses affected by the raid on Crydon were Intelmate, which provides inmate calling services for prisons and jails and had about $100,000 in equipment seized in the raid; a credit card processing company that had just become PCI compliant and was in the process of signing on its first customers; Primary Target, a video game company that makes first-person shooters; a mortgage brokerage; and a number of VoIP companies and international telecoms that provided customers with service to the U.S. through servers belonging to a separate company Faulkner ran called Intelivox. These customers essentially lost connectivity to the U.S. after the raid, Faulkner says.

Faulkner says the FBI appears to have assumed that all the servers located at Crydon’s address belonged to him, and didn’t seem to understand the concept of co-location.

The seized data included transactional records for companies, which means the companies won’t be able to bill customers for services already rendered before the raid.

"All of our clients will have to refund their customers, and we’re in the hole now to refund our customers," says Faulkner. "I could tell the FBI agent had never even considered that. He just said, ‘Well, that’s your problem.’"

The owner of a credit card processing company who had servers at Crydon says he lost about $35,000 in equipment in the seizure, and that the survival of his company is at risk until he secures a new location. He asked that he and his company not be named because the company is in the process of securing business partners to launch its processing service. He fears that news about the disruption to his business operation could lead potential partners to avoid contracting with him. To keep his launch on track, he’s had to purchase about $32,000 in new equipment.

He said when he tried to explain to an FBI agent that some of the servers that were seized belonged to him and not to Faulkner, the FBI agent implied he was lying.

"We were treated like we were criminals," he said. "They assumed there was no legitimate business in there."

In addition to the transaction servers taken from Crydon’s facility, he also lost telephone service for his company after the FBI raided Core IP, which housed a business that was providing his company with VoIP.

FBI spokesman White says the equipment seizures were necessary.

"My understanding is that the way these things are hooked up is that they’re interconnected to each other," he says. "Company A may be involved in some criminal activity and because of the interconnectivity of all these things, the information of what company A is doing may be sitting on company B or C or D’s equipment."

White says the FBI is working with affected companies to provide them with copies of seized data they need to run their businesses.

"It’s not that we’re doing nothing to assist them," White says. "We’ve repeatedly asked the companies to call and provide us with the information we need so we can get the info they need back to them. It is a time-consuming process."

The owner of the card-processing company, however, says the FBI has been "completely unresponsive" to the needs of Crydon customers caught up in the raid. An agent gave him a fax number to send the FBI details about the equipment that belongs to him, but the fax number didn’t work. Then, he says, the agent in charge took a vacation.

"They were all unavailable after they effectively seized all of our equipment," he says.

An agent told the customer that no equipment would be released until agents could determine if it was used in criminal activity. And if it was used for criminal activity, it wouldn’t be released until after a trial.

"Our equipment could be there indefinitely," the customer said. "There’s been no due process…. I consider this to be an issue for anyone owning a data center right now. That they have this much power and can take anyone just because your equipment is inside a facility…. They’re supposed to limit their search and seizure to the owner of the equipment."

Faulkner says he’s managed to replicate mail servers and some functionality for some customers and is building up new business resources elsewhere — this time offshore in Panama, Mexico and Canada, where the FBI would have trouble seizing servers in the future. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has contacted him to investigate the FBI’s possible violation of due process.

Faulkner says when he visited the FBI’s office after the raid, he found numerous cubicles stacked full of servers seized in other raids that were waiting for someone to examine them. The irony, he says, is that in the case of his servers the data was all hardware encrypted.

"It would take a lot of NSA time to crack just one of them," Faulkner says.

Many of the allegations against Faulkner are based on claims from an unidentified informant who told the FBI that he used to work for Faulkner, and witnessed many criminal acts Faulkner committed. The witness told authorities he was "unaware of any legitimate business being run by Faulkner and that as far as he/she knew all of his income was derived from his illegal activities." The informant also claimed Faulkner used crack cocaine and methamphetamine and engaged in commercial spamming.

Faulkner says the unnamed informant is a former employee who was fired after failing to show up to work over an extended period.

"We paid him $70,000 to help us launch a VoIP business, and he never actually did anything," Faulkner says.

Faulkner says he doesn’t do drugs and he’s never conducted spamming nor been associated with spammers. He says when he has discovered spammers using ISP services he provided through companies he owned in the past, he would block their activities.


http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/0 ... enters-ra/

[WaTcHeR]

During a speech today on “cybersecurity,” Obama told a whopper. He said the government’s effort to protect us from cyber bad guys “will not include monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic. We will preserve and protect the personal privacy and civil liberties that we cherish as Americans.”

Is it possible Obama has never heard of Mark Klein, the retired AT&T communications technician who said years ago that the company shunted all Internet traffic — including traffic from peering links connecting to other Internet backbone providers — to semantic traffic analyzers, installed in a secret room inside the AT&T central office on Folsom Street in San Francisco? There are similar rooms in Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego, all sucking up internet data.

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Whistleblower Mark Klein

Klein explained that the multinational corporation is doing this at the behest of the NSA. It is “vacuum-cleaner surveillance” approach that grabs everything. “Despite what we are hearing, and considering the public track record of [the Bush] administration, I simply do not believe their claims that the NSA’s spying program is really limited to foreign communications or is otherwise consistent with the NSA’s charter or with FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act],” said Klein in 2006.

After the NSA showed up in 2002 at AT&T’s Folsom Street facility, Klein began connecting the dots. “You might recall there was a big blowup in the news about the Total Information Awareness [TIA] program, led by Adm. [John] Poindexter, which caused the big upsetness in Congress, because what Poindexter was proposing to do was draw in databases from everywhere — and this was in The New York Times — draw in Internet data, bank records, travel records, everything into one big conglomeration which could be searchable by the government so they could find out everything about what anybody’s doing at any time of day,” Klein told PBS. “And all this would be done without any warrants. This is how it was presented by Poindexter himself in The New York Times, and that caused a great upset, brouhaha, in Congress.”

On January 16, 2003, Senator Russ Feingold introduced legislation to suspend the activity of the Total Information Awareness program pending a Congressional review of privacy issues involved. In February 2003, Congress passed legislation suspending activities of the IAO (Information Awareness Office) pending a Congressional report of the office’s activities.

Congress acted after William Safire published an article in the New York Times claiming “[TIA] has been given a $200 million budget to create computer dossiers on 300 million Americans” (see You Are a Suspect, November 14, 2002).

Of course, the program didn’t go away. Legislators included a classified annex to the Defense Appropriations Act that preserved funding for TIA’s component technologies, if they were transferred to other government agencies. TIA projects continued to be funded under classified annexes to Defense and Intelligence appropriation bills.

“Total Information Awareness — the all-seeing terrorist spotting algorithm-meets-the-mother-of-all-databases that was ostensibly de-funded by Congress in 2003, never actually died, and was largely rebuilt in secret by the NSA, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Siobhan Gorman,” Ryan Singel wrote for Wired on March 10, 2008. “There’s been no real debate in Congress or in the press about whether the government should be allowed to track every Americans phone calls, emails and web browsing.”

Jon Stokes, writing for Ars Technica, notes that TIA technology is nothing new. “TIA-like efforts are still going on” Stokes wrote in 2005, and “the government has been trying to use new technology, like database tech and voice recognition, for domestic surveillance for a long time. And when I say a long time, I mean well before the current administration came into office.” It really got a boost under Clinton in 1995 when the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) was passed. “CALEA mandated that the telcos aid wiretapping by installing remote wiretap ports onto their digital switches so that the switch traffic would be available for snooping by law enforcement.” In other words, Mark Klein had but scratched the surface.

Truman created the NSA in 1952, supposedly to serve as “America’s ears” abroad, but the agency has long served as a secret Stasi-like organization dedicated to snooping on Americans. The NSA, writes Siobhan Gorman for the Wall Street Journal, “and other intelligence agencies were found to be using their spy tools to monitor Americans for political purposes.”

The NSA’s predecessor, the Armed Forces Security Agency, launched Project SHAMROCK in 1945. It obtained copies of all telegraphic information exiting or entering the United States with the full cooperation of RCA, ITT and Western Union. A sister project known as Project MINARET involved the creation of “watch lists,” by each of the intelligence agencies and the FBI, of those accused of “subversive” domestic activities. The watch lists included such notables as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Jane Fonda, Joan Baez and Dr. Benjamin Spock, according to Patrick S. Poole, writing for Nexus Magazine in 1999. The FBI, the NSA, and other intelligence agencies were actively involved in creating the watch lists.

NSA has attempted to keep up on technology as the secretive agency continues to snoop on “subversives” and others the government considers miscreants. In February, trade publications reported the agency is offering “billions” to any firm able to offer reliable eavesdropping on Skype IM and voice traffic. Skype is particularity troublesome because it utilizes P2P networks, that is to say peer-top-peer (no central server owned and operated by a telecom required). The government and the corporate media may tell you they want to crack down on P2P — for instance, the vastly popular BitTorrent — because of copyright infringement, but a more practical reason is because the government has yet to figure out how to crack the file sharing protocol. Skype and BitTorrent account for a large amount of traffic on the internet.

If you think Obama will roll back the government’s massive and unconstitutional snoop program, think again. On April 3, the Obama Department of Justice filed a motion to dismiss one of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s landmark lawsuits against illegal spying by the NSA. The DOJ demanded that the entire lawsuit be dismissed based on both the Bush administration’s claim that a “state secrets” privilege bars any lawsuits against the executive branch for illegal spying, as well as a novel “sovereign immunity” claim that the Patriot Act bars lawsuits of any kind for illegal government surveillance (see the EFF press release, Obama Administration Embraces Bush Position on Warrantless Wiretapping and Secrecy).

In March, Obama’s coordinator for cybersecurity programs, Rod Beckstrom, a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur, quit because he opposed the role of the NSA in the so-called cybersecurity initiative. Beckstrom said “the threats to our democratic processes are significant if all top level government network security and monitoring are handled by” the NSA.

“Obama’s moves drew praise from key lawmakers on Capitol Hill, who vowed to work with the president to implement new security measures as needed,” CQPolitics reported shortly after his “cybersecurity” speech. “Obama said his cybersecurity adviser — who will be a member of both the National Security Staff and the National Economic Council staff — will head a new office within the White House.”

“We applaud President Obama for highlighting the extraordinarily serious issue of cybersecurity,” Sens. Johns D. Rockefeller IV, D-W.V., and Olympia J. Snowe , R-Maine, said in a joint statement. “No other president in American history has elevated this issue to that level and we think him for his leadership.”

No other president so far has had the power to shut down the internet. The Rockefeller-Snowe bill, S 778, would grant Obama dictatorial power declare a so-called “cyber emergency” and pull the plug, or at least cripple networks deemed a threat. The U.S. government is not seriously worried about Chinese hackers or mischievous kids in Latvia (as Rockefeller cited as a danger) but rather fear free and unfettered speech and activism on the part of its own citizens.

Obama’s promise is merely an effort to string you along with a big fat lie. He has absolutely no respect for you or the Bill of Rights.


http://www.infowars.com/cybersecurity-o ... stitution/

[WaTcHeR]

It's happening again. Another big corporation looking out for executives and big investors at the expense of workers.

AT&T made $12.9 billion in profits in 2008 and is on track this year for solid earnings, top executives say. Yet AT&T wants to cut quality jobs and benefits for employees.

Especially in these tough economic times, profitable companies like AT&T should lead the way in providing good, middle class jobs -- not look to cut benefits and lower middle class standards of living.

AT&T, we ask you to:

* Take the lead in helping to turn our economy around instead of copying the worst Wall Street behavior.

* Support the employees who make AT&T a success, and who help build today's high tech infrastructure.

* Work with CWA for real health care reform.

Americans want an economy that works for all of us.

Please Sign This Petition to AT&T Executives-Here: http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/standupforworkers

[WaTcHeR]

AT&T Will Scare You Into Keeping Your Landline

Keep your landline or your loved ones may die, seems to be the messaging tied to AT&T’s Home Base campaign released today. It comes on the heels of a Verizon ad aimed at getting non-Verizon landline customers to ditch their wires in exchange for wireless. The battle between wired and wireless is heating up. The AT&T campaign, complete with a picture of an ambulance racing to the scene, highlights the reliability and certainty that comes from being able to dial 9-1-1 from a landline. Copper, it could save your life.

I can’t fault AT&T for its scare tactics, given that those fears are exactly why we chose to revert back to a landline in our own home after going completely wireless. My mother-in-law was just too concerned about watching our toddler without that copper connection, since she often has a less-than-fully-charged wireless phone. However, some of the other reasons, pulled directly from an AT&T PDF, offer pretty lame rationales (fax machines? finding a phone in the dark?), as well as a failed grasp of numbering. How many of the reasons below do y’all find legit — or merely worth the $20 per month to connect via a copper landline?



http://gigaom.com/2009/07/07/att-will-s ... -landline/

[WaTcHeR]

Cyber security is a real issue, as evidenced by the virus behind July 4 cyber attacks that hobbled government and business websites in the United States and South Korea. It originated from Internet provider addresses in 16 countries and targeted, among others, the White House and the New York Stock Exchange.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration has chosen to combat it in a move that runs counter to its pledge to be transparent. The administration reportedly is proceeding with a Bush-era plan to use the National Security Agency to screen government computer traffic on private-sector networks. AT&T is slated to be the likely test site. This classified pilot program, dubbed “Einstein 3,” is developed but not yet rolled out. It takes two offenders from President Bush’s contentious secret surveillance program and puts them in charge of scrutinizing all Internet traffic going to or from federal government agencies.


http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/com ... 0671.story

[WaTcHeR]

Once Again, Government Moves to Delay Release of Telecom Lobbying Documents

This evening, the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Justice filed yet another emergency motion with the Ninth Circuit, asking for a stay of the deadline to release telecom immunity lobbying documents, less than 24 hours before the documents are due to be released to the public.

Almost simultaneously, a report appeared on Politico.com, claiming that the government will be releasing some documents, while fighting in court to hide the remainder. Despite this report, the government's motion seeks to delay disclosure of all the documents, and no new documents have been released just yet.

For those following this saga, this is deja vu all over again. Last week, when the documents were due to be turned over by Friday, October 9, the government asked the Court of Appeals for a stay, a motion that was denied by the Ninth Circuit in short order. Later that same afternoon, the government asked Federal District Court Judge Jeffrey White for an additional delay, a request that Judge White ultimately denied, giving the government a new deadline of Friday, October 16, by 4 p.m. Pacific time.

This has been a long fight -- since 2007, EFF has been working towards the release of these records after media reports revealed an extensive lobbying campaign seeking immunity for telecoms that participated in the government's unlawful surveillance program. As we've said before, we look forward to receiving the documents and making them public so that they can play a much-needed role in the active congressional debate over repealing telecom immunity.

UPDATED October 16, 3:15pm: Friday morning, EFF filed opposition to the government's motion. The government then filed a reply.

3:50pm: In order to give itself more time to decide whether to grant the requested stay, the Ninth Circuit Court has extended the deadline for disclosure of documents another week, until 5pm PT on Friday October 23.


http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/10/once-again

[KC]

Telephone Company Is Arm of Government, Feds Admit in Spy Suit

The Department of Justice has finally admitted it in court papers: The nation’s telecom companies are an arm of the government — at least when it comes to secret spying.

Fortunately, a judge says that relationship isn’t enough to quash a rights group’s open records request for communications between the nation’s telecoms and the feds.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation wanted to see what role telecom lobbying of the Justice Department played when the government began its year-long, and ultimately successful, push to win retroactive immunity for AT&T and others being sued for unlawfully spying on American citizens.

The feds argued that the documents showing consultation over the controversial telecom immunity proposal weren’t subject to the Freedom of Information Act since they were protected as “intra-agency” records:

“The communications between the agencies and telecommunications companies regarding the immunity provisions of the proposed legislation have been regarded as intra-agency because the government and the companies have a common interest in the defense of the pending litigation and the communications regarding the immunity provisions concerned that common interest.”

U.S. District Court Judge Jeffery White disagreed and ruled on September 24 that the feds had to release the names of the telecom employees that contacted the Justice Department and the White House to lobby for a get-out-of-court-free card.

“Here, the telecommunications companies communicated with the government to ensure that Congress would pass legislation to grant them immunity from legal liability for their participation in the surveillance,” White wrote. “Those documents are not protected from disclosure because the companies communicated with the government agencies “with their own … interests in mind,” rather than the agency’s interests.”

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/att-doj-foia/

[KC]

January 21st, 2010 - EFF Plans Appeal of Jewel v. NSA Warrantless Wiretapping Case Court Rules That Mass Surveillance of Americans is Immune From Judicial Review

San Francisco - A federal judge has dismissed Jewel v. NSA, a case from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on behalf of AT&T customers challenging the National Security Agency's mass surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans' phone calls and emails.

"We're deeply disappointed in the judge's ruling," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "This ruling robs innocent telecom customers of their privacy rights without due process of law. Setting limits on Executive power is one of the most important elements of America's system of government, and judicial oversight is a critical part of that."

In the ruling, issued late Thursday, U.S. District Court Chief Judge Vaughn Walker held that the privacy harm to millions of Americans from the illegal spying dragnet was not a "particularized injury" but instead a "generalized grievance" because almost everyone in the United States has a phone and Internet service.

"The alarming upshot of the court's decision is that so long as the government spies on all Americans, the courts have no power to review or halt such mass surveillance even when it is flatly illegal and unconstitutional," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "With new revelations of illegal spying being reported practically every other week -- just this week, we learned that the FBI has been unlawfully obtaining Americans' phone records using Post-It notes rather than proper legal process -- the need for judicial oversight when it comes to government surveillance has never been clearer."

Jewel v. NSA is aimed at ending the NSA's dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans and holding accountable the government officials who illegally authorized it. Evidence in the case includes undisputed documents provided by former AT&T telecommunications technician Mark Klein showing AT&T has routed copies of Internet traffic to a secret room in San Francisco controlled by the NSA. That same evidence is central to Hepting v. AT&T, a class-action lawsuit that's currently under appeal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

For the judge's full order:
http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/jewel ... l12110.pdf

For more on warrantless wiretapping and NSA spying:
http://www.eff.org/issues/nsa-spying




http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2010/01/21