Watching What You Say (Page 2)

According to Alan Mauldin, a senior research analyst with TeleGeography Research in Washington, DC, it would be possible for US intelligence operatives to gain access to transit traffic from anywhere in the country with the cooperation of a US company. "You could be inland, at an important city like New York or Washington, DC, where networks interconnect, and you could have the ability to tap into the whole network for not only that city but between that city and the rest of the world," he says. Foreign-owned cable operators, says Gidari, are also required by US law to maintain security offices manned by US citizens, with background checks and security clearances at the landing sites in Oregon, Florida, New Jersey and other states where fiber-optic cables come ashore.

The government has gone to great lengths to insure law-enforcement access to foreign-owned telecom companies. Take the example of Global Crossing, which owns several undersea cable systems and claims to serve more than 700 carriers, mobile operators and ISPs. Three years ago, as Global Crossing was emerging from one of the largest bankruptcies in US history, it was purchased by ST Telemedia, which is partly owned by the government of Singapore. As part of the US approval process (which occurred at a time when Global Crossing was being advised by Richard Perle, then-chairman of Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board), the company signed an unprecedented Network Security Agreement with the FBI and the Defense Department. Under the agreement, which is on file with the Federal Communications Commission, Global Crossing pledged that "all domestic communications" would pass through a facility "physically located in the United States, from which Electronic Surveillance can be conducted pursuant to lawful US process." (Global Crossing declined to comment.) Legal experts say the wording is significant in the context of the NSA spying flap, but cautioned not to read too much into it. "These agreements are not uncommon in the industry," says James Andrew Lewis, director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "They provide assurances that US interests won't suffer damage with foreign ownership."

History proves a good guide to how the NSA would go about winning cooperation from a telecom company. When telephone and telegraph companies began assisting the NSA during the 1940s, only one or two executives were in on the secret. That kind of arrangement continued into the 1970s, and is probably how cooperation with the NSA works today, says Kenneth Bass III, a Justice Department official during the Carter Administration. "Once the CEO approved, all the contacts [with the intelligence agencies] would be worked at a lower level," he says. "The telcos have been participating in surveillance activities for decades--pre-FISA, post-FISA--so it's nothing new to them." Bass, who helped craft the FISA law and worked with the NSA to implement it, adds that he "would not be surprised at all" if cooperating executives received from the Bush Administration "the same sort of briefing, but much more detailed and specific than the FISA court got when [the surveillance] was first approved."

For US intelligence officials looking for allies in the industry, AT&T, MCI and Sprint have a lot to offer. In 2002, when the spying program began, AT&T's CEO was C. Michael Armstrong, the former CEO of Hughes Electronic Corp. At the time, Armstrong was also chairman of the Business Roundtable's Security Task Force, where he was instrumental in creating CEO COM LINK, a secure telecommunications system that allows the chief executives of major US corporations to speak directly to senior members of Bush's Cabinet during national emergencies. Randall Stephenson, a former SBC Communications executive who is now AT&T's chief operating officer, is a member of the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, a group of executives from the communications and defense industries who advise the President on security issues related to telecom.

Those executives, all of whom hold security clearances, meet at the White House once a year--Vice President Cheney was the speaker at their last meeting--and hold quarterly conference calls with high-ranking officials. (Asked if the NSA surveillance was ever discussed at these sessions, committee spokesman Stephen Barrett said, "We do not participate in intelligence gathering.") AT&T also makes no bones about its national security work. When SBC was preparing to acquire the company last year, the two companies underscored their ties with US intelligence in joint comments to the FCC. "AT&T's support of the intelligence and defense communities includes the performance of various classified contracts," the companies said, pointing out that AT&T "maintains special secure facilities for the performance of classified work and the safeguarding of classified information."

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