Terrorists Not the Only Targets of Government Secret Surveillance
The government’s data-mining program, in which it enlists telecommunications companies to help find suspicious calling patterns, isn’t being used exclusively to find terrorists.
The government has cited the National Security Agency’s reliance on warrantless wiretaps to catch terrorists as it seeks legislation to extend the program and protect cooperating companies. Attorney General Michael Mukasey also called for liability protection in a recent editorial.
But the secret data-mining program covers more ground, and it began before the Sept. 11 attacks, the New York Times reports. “At stake is the federal government’s extensive but uneasy partnership with industry to conduct a wide range of secret surveillance operations,” the newspaper says.
Data mining is being used to combat drug trafficking, for example, by combing records for calls made to Latin American countries, the New York Times reports. The Drug Enforcement Administration has been looking for suspicious calling patterns since the 1990s, but it is now expanding the program, which relies on administrative subpoenas (PDF) for authority.
Nor are government efforts confined to international calls, the story says.
In one case, Qwest Communications refused a government request in early 2001 for access to localized communications switches that carried mostly domestic traffic, the Times story says. Qwest’s convicted CEO, Joseph Nacchio, has previously said the government had a secret surveillance program before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, but details about the domestic nature of the wiretaps have not been reported.
Nacchio refused to cooperate, but government officials say he was motivated by a misunderstanding of the proposal, which was focused on foreigners using the local network. Nacchio claims in an appeal of an insider trading conviction that he believed his rosy public forecasts about Qwest because he thought the company was about to win the lucrative government contracts, but those contracts were lost because of his refusal to cooperate in the surveillance program.
