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Media Consortium Report: Snoops Get a Direct Line

It seemed like shocking news last week when the telecommunications giant Verizon admitted it has readily allowed national security investigators without warrants to browse customer records on thousands of occasions. But given the revolving door between the telecom industry and federal government, no one should be surprised by their cozy relationship.

According to OpenSecrets.org, a web site run by the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, D.C., the worlds are well connected: There is no shortage of government officials who once worked in the telecommunications industry or of telecommunications industry execs who once worked for the government.

Many of the men and women who have hopped the fence—sometimes more than once—have done so via predictable channels. It’s not uncommon, for instance, for aides and commissioners to the Federal Communications Commission to come from or move on to careers in telecommunications. It’s arguably not even that surprising. But some of those moving on—like the executives who fill Verizon’s ranks—have spent years in federal jobs fighting for the government’s right to pry into consumer data.

In an October 12 letter to Democratic lawmakers, Randal S. Milch, senior vice president and general counsel at Verizon, admitted that, in tens of thousands of instances over the last two years, his company has provided government officials with subscriber information without court orders. According to the letter, that information has included subscriber names and addresses, local and long-distance telephone connection records, and methods and sources of payment.

Serving alongside Milch is William P. Barr, executive vice president and general counsel at Verizon. In Barr’s past life, he was an analyst for the CIA, then a domestic policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan, and finally the attorney general of the United States under President George H.W. Bush. Throughout his government career, and well after he’d moved into the telecommunications industry, Barr has shown a voracious appetite for government surveillance.

In 1995, after he’d made the switch, he told the House Judiciary Committee that emergency wiretap authority exists under current law with respect to a range of criminal activity” and had been used sparingly. “It is clearly appropriate that the same emergency authority that applies with respect to Mafia conspiracies also applies to terrorist conspiracies.”

He argued that, when conducting surveillance, a single subpoena issued by the government should be sufficient to cover multiple telephones registered to an individual target. “It is impractical to identify a particular phone. . . . After all, the right to privacy guaranteed under the Fourth Amendment is an individual’s right to privacy; it is not an inanimate object’s right to privacy. Roving wiretaps targeted at particular suspects rather than specific phones should not cause alarm.”

Barr’s testimony was cited in the House Report on the Comprehensive Antiterrorism Act of 1995 as justification for an expansion of federal wiretapping authority. The following year, he advocated on behalf of the use of intelligence information in domestic law enforcement proceedings in cases of suspected terrorism.

And that was all before September 11, 2001. After the terrorist attacks, Barr re-emerged on Capitol Hill to lend his support to controversial measures such as beefed up executive privilege, broadened authority under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the USA Patriot Act, and the use of military tribunals.

Barr may represent the most overtly wiretap-friendly liaison between the telecom industry and the government of the United States, but he’s far from alone among advocates who crossed over to Verizon. Peter Davidson, Verizon’s chief lobbyist, was once a staffer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and served as general counsel to former Texas Representative Dick Armey when Armey was House majority leader. Among those who moved the other way is Edward Whelan, a former senior vice president at Verizon who, from mid 2001 to 2004, was principal deputy assistant attorney for the Office of Legal Counsel. Earlier in his career he clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia. He later wrote an article defending Justice Samuel Alito, who, in memos that eerily presage the current FISA debate, argued “an executive branch official who authorized the illegal wiretapping of U.S. citizens without a warrant should be immune from lawsuits,” according to Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe. The Alito memos were written in his Justice Department days, before he was appointed to the Supreme Court.

None of this necessarily means Verizon and other telecom firms can’t be trusted to honor our privacy, and the law. But it does show that if the executive branch wants access to nominally protected information, or the Congress wants to expand the legal framework in which surveillance is allowed, industry doors are wide open with friends eagerly waiting.



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