Kevin Poulsen at Threat Level reports on yet another disturbing instance of a telecom company partnering with the federal government to allow unfettered access to their customers voice and data traffic:

A U.S. government office in Quantico, Virginia, has direct, high-speed access to a major wireless carrier’s systems, exposing customers’ voice calls, data packets and physical movements to uncontrolled surveillance, according to a computer security consultant who says he worked for the carrier in late 2003.

“What I thought was alarming is how this carrier ended up essentially allowing a third party outside their organization to have unfettered access to their environment,” Babak Pasdar, now CEO of New York-based Bat Blue told Threat Level. “I wanted to put some access controls around it; they vehemently denied it. And when I wanted to put some logging around it, they denied that.”

Pasdar won’t name the wireless carrier in question, but his claims are nearly identical to unsourced allegations made in a federal lawsuit filed in 2006 against four phone companies and the U.S. government for alleged privacy violations. That suit names Verizon Wireless as the culprit.

…

According to his affidavit, Pasdar tumbled to the surveillance superhighway in September 2003, when he led a “Rapid Deployment” team hired to revamp security on the carrier’s internal network. He noticed that the carrier’s officials got squirrelly when he asked about a mysterious “Quantico Circuit” — a 45 megabit/second DS-3 line linking its most sensitive network to an unnamed third party.

Quantico, Virginia, is home to a Marine base. But perhaps more relevantly, it’s also the center of the FBI’s electronic surveillance operations.

“The circuit was tied to the organization’s core network,” Pasdar writes in his affidavit. “It had access to the billing system, text messaging, fraud detection, web site, and pretty much all the systems in the data center without apparent restrictions.” [Emphasis added]

This is as frightening a development as any other in the already widespread documentation of telecom companies partnering with the Bush administration to give intelligence and military agencies unprecedented, unregulated access to information about Americans. The surveillance described above is not regulated by warrant. It is not targeted. There is no indication that it is minimized. And the nature of the circuit means that the government has the ability to track the physical location of this telecom company’s customers, as well as their financial records, voice, text, and data transmissions.

Equally troubling is that this telecom resisted all efforts by Pasdar to not only limit the government’s access to this massive stream of information, but keep track of what is being transmitted through the circuit.

Two general principles make themselves crystal clear in this story. The Bush administration has sought and achieved unprecedented capacities to spy on Americans without warrant and without regard to duly passed, long standing laws regarding domestic surveillance. The big telecom companies have been willing partners in this process at almost every step. The big telecom companies have been willing partners in this process at almost every step. These companies and this administration must be held accountable for their lawlessness and their repeated, systemic violations of Americans’ civil liberties.

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Cross posted at the CREDO Action Blog.

Yesterday ThinkProgress highlighted a story about Boston College Law School deciding to not honor Attorney General Michael Mukasey as planned when he speaks at their commencement this spring. Mukasey’s selection as the commencement speaker has been the subject of criticism because of his stance on torture.

Dan Roth, a 2004 Law School graduate, said that while he was pleased by yesterday’s announcement, he believes that the school should have rescinded Mukasey’s invitation altogether, because his position on waterboarding conflicts with the university’s Jesuit mission.

“It’s not the time to give someone who has taken that position the platform and the honor,” Roth said.

Eagleionline, the BC Law Blog, includes this quote from my former co-blogger at Emboldened, Austin Evers.

Austin Evers ‘09, who currently serves as the President of the Boston College Law School chapter of the American Constitution Society (ACS), said, “This is good news. It is dangerous to conflate an invitation to speak with an endorsement of the speaker’s views by the institution. Attorney General Mukasey is still very controversial but I think this goes a long way to clarifying BC’s position on the matter.”

Evers is currently working with the administration to host an event on waterboarding and other issues surrounding the Attorney General’s invitations. He is also Managing Editor of Eagleionline.

I think we’re going to continue to see Bush administration officials have their speeches and awards protested and, hopefully, canceled thanks to student and alumni pressure on their schools.  In January students at Choate Rosemary Hall, a prep school in Connecticut, successfully protested the selection of Karl Rove as their commencement speaker. When Rove’s speech was rescheduled, students showed up and challenged not just his presence, but his damaging political views. Hopefully the Choate model will play out at BC and Mukasey will eventually be canceled as this year’s commencement speaker. But if he does end up speaking, I would expect students to continue to protest his presence on campus as representative of an administration that holds views contrary to the rule of law and their school’s mission.

Ryan Singel at Threat Level makes a key observation about the information in the Washington Post story yesterday on the potential FISA deal in Congress.

In the end, it turns out it’s all about the emails.

The fight in Congress and the big push for expanded wiretapping powers has nothing to do with intercepting foreign-to-foreign phone calls inside the United States without a court order. In fact, it turns out that the nation’s secret wiretapping court is fine with that.

That extraordinary admission came from Assistant Attorney General for National Security Kenneth Wainstein at a breakfast on Monday, according to the Washington Post.

At the breakfast yesterday, Wainstein highlighted a different problem with the current FISA law than other administration officials have emphasized. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, for example, has repeatedly said FISA should be changed so no warrant is needed to tap a communication that took place entirely outside the United States but happened to pass through the United States.

But in response to a question at the meeting by David Kris, a former federal prosecutor and a FISA expert, Wainstein said FISA’s current strictures did not cover strictly foreign wire and radio communications, even if acquired in the United States. The real concern, he said, is primarily e-mail, because “essentially you don’t know where the recipient is going to be” and so you would not know in advance whether the communication is entirely outside the United States.

That would make sense since email doesn’t go directly to a device in most cases, it goes to a server that holds the email until the recipient(s) come to pick up the email — which could be and often is from different parts of the world — think of any business traveler.

But that also means all the hysterical screaming and the dire scenarios constructed by right-wing spying proponents based on very thin evidence of what the secret court actually ruled — all of it is just wrong.

And more to the point, the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence allowed them to be wrong for months. They allowed and facilitated their supporters to scare freedom loving people with phantoms of lost wiretaps.

DNI Michael McConnell, the serial exaggerator who claims to be a non-political straight shooter, himself kept saying the NSA lost 70 percent of its capabilities after the ruling.

If that’s the case, that means that 70 percent of what the NSA does is collect emails inside United States telecom infrastructure and service providers.

This past Monday we saw the Computer & Communications Industry Association send a letter to Congress, stating their strong opposition to retroactive immunity. The CCIA is a trade group that consists of technology telecoms like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems. They are companies that collect a great deal of information about their users. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are three of the biggest, if not the biggest, providers of free email services. If Wainstein, the Assistant Attorney General for National Security, is saying this is all about email, then what the CCIA has to say about the issue is highly relevant.

Wainstein’s statement also blows up the false notion that the concerns regarding FISA have to do with how the government’s surveillance of foreign-to-foreign phone calls. Kurt Opsahl of the EFF writes:

In short, Wainstein said that the current interpretation of FISA does not impede the interception of foreign-to-foreign telephone calls – even after the secret FISA court ruling that McConnell claims required the change in the law. Indeed, it does not impede the interception of foreign-to-foreign emails, VOIP calls or other communications, so long as you know both ends are foreign.

Opsahl goes on to note that this sort of development is exactly why making public policy when a significant portion of the facts are secret is such a bad idea. I’d add that this is even more true when it comes to making decisions about abandoning the rule of law.

In my eyes, the revelations from Wainstein show the lack of urgency for granting retroactive immunity and passing new surveillance laws. The fear-mongering scenarios pushed by President Bush and his Republican cohort are not connected to any real scenario threatening our intelligence community’s collection abilities. This cuts against the need to grant the executive branch even more surveillance power, while reducing the oversight capacities of the legislative and judicial branches. It is also clear that immunity for the phone companies that partnered with the Bush administration to spy on Americans without warrant is even less necessary as a precondition for moving forward and confronting the challenges facing our intelligence community.

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Cross posted at the CREDO Action Blog.