OpEdNews
Original Content July 2, 2008

Telecom Whistleblower Exposes Unfettered Orwellian Electronic Spying on US Citizens
By BABAK PASDAR

In October 2003, I led a rapid deployment team for a major wireless carrier responsible for overhauling its security system. For the past year and a half, I have anonymously briefed Congress and nongovernment organizations about my observations, going public last month with crucial public interest information: An unknown third party using a mysterious "Quantico Circuit" has provided the federal government with unfettered access to everything on the carrier's network. Recognizing this critical security breach and taking preliminary correction steps, my attempts at implementing controls and logging were blocked and rebutted with threats and admonishments by carrier executives.

Despite ready capabilities, the company had opted not to protect itself and its customers. Unfettered access to the carrier's systems offers powerful information. All calls and data communications including e-mail, Web, text messages, pictures and videos are attainable in real-time. Any person could be physically located, and billing records including names, financial information, contacts and behavioral data, are accessible.

Tracking abilities have expanded to subscriber desktops with new "smartphones" -- unnecessarily requiring personal log on credentials to business and personal computers to deliver e-mail, contact and calendaring information. This entrusts private information with the carrier that goes far beyond mobile phone usage.On March 4, I disclosed my experience in an affidavit to Congress. On March 6, House Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell wrote a "Dear Colleague" letter to all 435 House members requesting an investigation prior to any carrier immunity discussions.

On March 14, the House voted to deny immunity and to investigate the telecoms. Who was at the other end of the Quantico Circuit? What information did they obtain? Does this comply with longstanding federal law? Are telecoms and other corporations paid to betray our privacy? We need answers to those questions and more. What I witnessed is just one strand in a technological web that all but eliminates any expectation of privacy. Aside from the capabilities described above, credit, ATM and even grocery discount cards can and are being used to identify, locate, track and behaviorally categorize people. Ubiquitous Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are permanently hidden in almost everything including clothes, packaged goods, credit cards and toll payment devices.

As small as a grain of sand, they offer not just tracking but also detailed information on anyone or any item. Let's not forget the ever-expanding network of surveillance cameras that monitor highways, street corners, stores and buildings that are augmented by an even larger network of ATM cameras. Satellites can be turned on citizens -- consider Google maps. Our government tracks all Internet use with powerful tools that analyze and prepare behavior-based reports. Any single piece of information can be effortlessly cross-referenced to build an electronic dragnet constantly monitoring our actions and even predicting our behavior. Information overload and processing power, once the sole barrier to these tactics, are no longer a factor.

Given precipitous developments in technology, inaction today would surely have an exponentially greater impact on the rights and lives of future American generations -- where an Orwellian nightmare would become reality. My observations at the telecom may be the tip of an iceberg that is fatal for a free society. Before there are any more blank checks to disregard the law, we need to investigate and learn the full scope of indiscriminate corporate and administration spying.
Babak Pasdar is president and CEO of Bat Blue Corp.

Authors Bio: Babak Pasdar has charged "at least one major wireless telecommunications giant" of giving "a Governmental entity access to every communication coming through that company's infrastructure, including every e-mail, Internet use, document transmission, video, and text message, as well as the ability to listen in on any phone call." Pasdar has been known to the committee for some time, but he has come forward publicly now because the Bush administration has blocked every effort to investigate his charges privately. His allegations mirror those of retired AT&T technician Mark Klein, who came forward accusing his company of providing the government access to, well, just about everything. Dingell, (along with subcommittee chairmen Edward Markey and Bart Stupak) write "Members should be given adequate time to properly evaluate the separate question of retroactive immunity."

March 7, 2008
A New FISA Whistleblower
LINK

Some powerful congressmen are raising new questions about telecom immunity based upon the allegations of a new industry whistleblower. In a letter released yesterday, three senior members of the House Energy and Commerce committee, including its chairman, John Dingell (D-Mich.) highlight the case of Babak Pasdar, who has charged "at least one major wireless telecommunications giant" of giving "a Governmental entity access to every communication coming through that company's infrastructure, including every e-mail, Internet use, document transmission, video, and text message, as well as the ability to listen in on any phone call."

Pasdar has been known to the committee for some time, but he has come forward publicly now because the Bush administration has blocked every effort to investigate his charges privately.

His allegations mirror those of retired AT&T technician Mark Klein, who came forward accusing his company of providing the government access to, well, just about everything. Dingell, (along with subcommittee chairmen Edward Markey and Bart Stupak) write "Members should be given adequate time to properly evaluate the separate question of retroactive immunity."

At least. The letter can be accessed here.

Posted by Brian Beutler on 03/07/08

Whistle-Blower: Feds Have a Backdoor Into Wireless Carrier -- Congress Reacts
By Kevin Poulsen EmailMarch 06, 2008 | 9:15:00 PMCategories: Spooks Gone Wild

Quantico 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.

Pasdar has executed a seven-page affidavit for the nonprofit Government Accountability Project in Washington, which on Tuesday began circulating the document (.pdf), along with talking points (.doc), to congressional staffers hashing out a Republican proposal to grant retroactive legal immunity to phone companies who cooperated in the warrantless wiretapping of Americans.

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."

The 2006 lawsuit (.pdf), which is suspended pending an appeals court ruling, describes a similar arrangement, naming Verizon.

Because the data center was a clearing house for all Verizon Wireless calls, the transmission line provided the Quantico recipient direct access to all content and all information concerning the origin and termination of telephone calls placed on the Verizon Wireless network as well as the actual content of calls.

The transmission line was unprotected by any firewall and would have enabled the recipient on the Quantico end to have unfettered access to Verizon Wireless customer records, data and information. Any customer databases, records and information could be downloaded from this center.

That doesn't mean Pasdar's affidavit confirms the claims in the lawsuit. He acknowledges speaking with the attorneys on that lawsuit before it was filed, so he may be the source in that complaint as well. But he insists he did not name Verizon or any other phone company to the lawyers.

"I don't know if I have a smoking gun, but I'm certainly fairly confident in what I saw and I'm convinced it was being leveraged in a less than forthright and upfront manner," Pasdar says.

Verizon spokesman Peter Thonis says he can't confirm or deny a Quantico arrangement, or comment on whether Pasdar did contract work for the company.

"What you're talking about sounds as if it would be classified and involving national security, so I wouldn't be able to find out the facts," Thonis writes in an e-mail.

Postscript: In response to some of the comments here and elsewhere: No, it's not CALEA. CALEA requires phone companies to give the FBI real time access to call content and call detail information on specific targets when presented with a warrant. It does not oblige them to give the FBI or anyone else direct unmonitored access to switches, billing systems or databases.

For more on the FBI's CALEA network, check out Ryan's article on the subject from last year.

Update: Democratic leaders in the House are taking Pasdar's claims seriously. John Dingell, the chairman of the Energy and Commerce committee, wrote a Dear Colleague letter (.pdf) today, addressing the issue.

Mr. Pasdar's allegations are not new to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, but our attempts to verify and investigate them further have been blocked at every turn by the Administration. Moreover, the whistleblower's allegations echo those in an affidavit filed by Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against AT&T. ...

Because legislators should not vote before they have sufficient facts, we continue to insist that all House Members be given access to the necessary information, including the relevant documents underlying this matter, to make an informed decision on their vote. After reviewing the documentation and these latest allegations, Members should be given adequate time to properly evaluate the separate question of retroactive immunity."

Qwest CEO Not Alone in Alleging NSA Started Domestic Phone Record Program 7 Months Before 9/11
By Ryan Singel Email, October 12, 2007
LINK

Startling statements from former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio's defense documents alleging the National Security Agency began building a massive call records database seven months before 9/11 aren't the only accusations that the controversial program predated the attacks of 9/11.

According to court documents unveiled this week, former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio clearly wanted to argue in court that the NSA retaliated against his company after he turned down a NSA request on February 27, 2001 that he thought was illegal. Nacchio's attorney issued a carefully worded statement in 2006, saying that Nacchio had turned down the NSA's repeated requests for customer call records. The statement says that Nacchio was asked for the records in the fall of 2001, but doesn't say he was "first asked" then.

And in May 2006, a lawsuit filed against Verizon for allegedly turning over call records to the NSA alleged that AT&T began building a spying facility for the NSA just days after President Bush was inaugurated. That lawsuit is one of 50 that were consolidated and moved to a San Francisco federal district court, where the suits sit in limbo waiting for the 9th Circuit Appeals court to decide whether the suits can proceed without endangering national security.

According the allegations in the suit (.pdf):

The project was described in the ATT sales division documents as calling for the construction of a facility to store and retain data gathered by the NSA from its domestic and foreign intelligence operations but was to be in actuality a duplicate ATT Network Operations Center for the use and possession of the NSA that would give the NSA direct, unlimited, unrestricted and unfettered access to all call information and internet and digital traffic on ATTÌs long distance network. [...]

The NSA program was initially conceived at least one year prior to 2001 but had been called off; it was reinstated within 11 days of the entry into office of defendant George W. Bush.

An ATT Solutions logbook reviewed by counsel confirms the Pioneer-Groundbreaker project start date of February 1, 2001.

The allegations in that case come from unnamed AT&T insiders, who have never stepped forward or provided any documentation to the courts. But Carl Mayer, one of the attorneys in the case, stands by the allegations in the lawsuit.

"All we can say is, we told you so," Mayer told THREAT LEVEL.

Mayer says the issue of when the call records program started - a program that unlike the admitted warrantless wiretapping, the administration has never confirmed nor denied - should play a role in the upcoming confirmation hearings of Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey.

Mukasey will have to "come clean on when this program started," Mayer said. "The entire rationale was that it was necessitated by 9/11."

All of the cases pending against the nation's telecoms for allegedly violating the nation's surveillance and privacy laws could be mooted if Congress gives immunity to the companies, as the Administration and the telcos powerful lobbyists are arguing for.

Immunity isn't what Mayer wants.

"The real obligation is upon the Democrats to demand turnover of these documents,"
But Mayer and Nacchio may not even be the only two arguing that the NSA started a program of collecting Americans' phone records before 9/11.

In a January 2006 Slate article that came out before the USA Today totally blew open the call records story in May 2006, Tim Naftali and THREAT LEVEL pal Shane Harris reported:

A former telecom executive told us that efforts to obtain call details go back to early 2001, predating the 9/11 attacks and the president's now celebrated secret executive order. The source, who asked not to be identified so as not to out his former company, reports that the NSA approached U.S. carriers and asked for their cooperation in a "data-mining" operation, which might eventually cull "millions" of individual calls and emails.

So, the question is was Nacchio the one talking to Harris and Natfali? Or was it an executive from another company?

The evidence remains inconclusive, but one would think that before telecoms get immunity for allegedly helping the government after 9/11 out of patriotism, Congress should see if the companies began helping out prior to 9/11 with their eyes not on the flag, but on the secret dollars that the NSA could add to their bottom lines.

NSA Domestic Surveillance Began 7 Months Before 9/11, Convicted Qwest CEO Claims
By Ryan Singel EmailOctober 11, 2007 | 7:20:59 PMCategories: NSA

follow qwest down the rabbit holeDid the NSA's massive call records database program pre-date the terrorist attacks of 9/11?

That startling allegation is in court documents released this week which show that former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio -- the head of the only company known to have turned down the NSA's requests for Americans' phone records -- tried, unsuccessfully, to argue just that in his defense against insider trading charges.

Nacchio was sentenced to 6 years in prison in 2007 after being found guilty of illegally selling shares based on insider information that the company's fortunes were declining. Nacchio unsuccessfully attempted to defend himself by arguing that he actually expected Qwest's 2001 earnings to be higher because of secret NSA contracts, which, he contends, were denied by the NSA after he declined in a February 27, 2001 meeting to give the NSA customer calling records, court documents released this week show.

AT&T, Verizon and Bellsouth all agreed to turn over call records to an NSA database, according to reporting in the USA Today in 2006. At that time, Nacchio's lawyer publicly stated that Nacchio declined to participate until served with a proper legal order.

The government has never confirmed or denied the existence of the program, but is trying to win legal immunity for telecoms being sued for their alleged participation in the call records program and the government's warrantless wiretapping of Americans. Turning over customer records to anyone, including the government, without proper legal orders violates federal privacy laws.

Nacchio's attempt to depose witnesses and present the classified defense was declined by Colorado federal district court judge Edward Nottingham, a decision that is playing a role in Nacchio's pending appeal to the 10th Circuit Appeals court.

The allegation is peppered throughout the highly redacted documents released by the lower court today, but are most clear in the introduction to this filing (.pdf) from April 2007.

Defendant Joseph P. Nacchio ... respectfully renews his objection to the Court's rulings excluding testimony surrounding his February 27, 2001 meeting at Ft. Meade with representatives from the National Security Agency (NSA) as violative of his constitutional right to mount a defense. Although Mr. Nacchio is allowed to tell the jury that he and James Payne went into that meeting expecting to talk about the "Groundbreaker" project and came out of the meeting with optimism about the prospect for 2001 revenue from NSA, the Court has prohibited Mr. Nacchio from eliciting testimony regarding what also occurred at that meeting. [REDACTED] The Court has also refused to allow Mr. Nacchio to demonstrate that the agency retaliated for this refusal by denying the Groundbreaker and perhaps other work to Qwest.

By being prevented from telling his full story to the jury or from fully and properly cross-examining any rebuttal witnesses, Mr. Nacchio has been deprived of the ability to explaoin why - after he came out of the February meeting with a reasonable, good faith, expectation that Qwest would be receiving significant contracts from NSA in 2001 ... Qwest was denied significant work.

[ed note. James Payne, Qwest's government liason who was also at February 27, 2001 meeting, later spoke with government agents in 2006].

In the interview, Mr. Payne confirmed that, at the February 27, 2001 meeting, "[t]here was some discussion about [redacted]. Mr. Payne also stated: Subsequent to the meeting the customer came back and expressed disappointment at Qwest's decision. Payne realized at this time that "no" was not going to be enough fro them. Payne said they never actually said no and it went on for years. In meetings after meetings, they would bring it up. At one point, he suggested they just them, "no." Nacchio said it was a legal issue and that they could not do something their general counsel told them not to do. ... Nacchio projected that he might do it if they could find a way to do it legally.

There was a feeling also, that the NSA acted as agents for other government agencies and if Qwest frustrated the NSA, they would also frustrate other agencies.

The Groundbreaker contract, reportedly worth $2 - $5 billion dollars, outsources the NSA's IT management, but at least one lawsuit charges the project was cover for a domestic spying program.

Notably, after the USA Today story ran , Nacchio's lawyer Herbert Stern, who argued his case before trial, released this statement:

In light of pending litigation, I have been reluctant to issue any public statements. However, because of apparent confusion concerning Joe Nacchio and his role in refusing to make private telephone records of Qwest customers available to the NSA immediately following the Patriot Act, and in order to negate misguided attempts to relate Mr. Nacchio's conduct to present litigation, the following are the facts.

In the Fall of 2001, at a time when there was no investigation of Qwest or Mr. Nacchio by the Department of Justice or the Securities and Exchange Commission, and while Mr. Nacchio was Chairman and CEO of Qwest and was serving pursuant to the President's appointment as the Chairman of the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, Qwest was approached to permit the Government access to the private telephone records of Qwest customers.

Mr. Nacchio made inquiry as to whether a warrant or other legal process had been secured in support of that request. When he learned that no such authority had been granted and that there was a disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process, including the Special Court which had been established to handle such matters, Mr. Nacchio concluded that these requests violated the privacy requirements of the Telecommunications Act.

Accordingly, Mr. Nacchio issued instructions to refuse to comply with these requests. These requests continued throughout Mr. Nacchio's tenure and until his departure in June of 2002.

Note that Stern says a request was made in the Fall of 2001. Stern does not say "first approached" in the statement, though that clearly seems to be the implication. But it's not what the four corners of Stern's statement says. And finally, the redactions in the documents make it impossible to say what the February 21, 2001 requests from the NSA were. It could have been a request from NSA to do some other eavesdropping thing that Nacchio felt uncomfortable with, but I'm very doubtful.