The evidence isn’t definitive yet, but assuming this isn’t a Big Lie by corporate executives of different competing companies, the Bush adminstration was setting up this program in Febroary of 2001, months before the 9/11 attacks.
Two claims have come to light, in legal documents filed by the attorneys of current or former phone company exectives. One claim is part of an appeal of the conviction for insider trading by former Qwest CEO Joseph P. Nacchio. You may recall news a few years back, when the government approached the big telecoms for assistance on their domestic spying program, Qwest refused on the grounds that it would be illegal. Nacchio now says this request was made at a meeting in February of 2001, according to this Washington Post story. Nacchio also claimed that subsequently the government punished the company by not allowing them contracts worth many millions of dollars, and the subsequent value of the stock and his own actions were influenced by this process, which could not be made public due to national security concerns. Exactly how these things interacted is not real clear, but Nacchio is apparently suggesting that his actions might not have been considered crimes if the whole story would have been presented to the jury.
The other claims are part of lawsuit against Verizon for turning over customer records to the program. Here is a Wired story quoting part of the papers filed in the suit:
Groundbreaker is apparently the project name for a whole set of eavesdropping and/or data mining programs instituted by the NSA in conjunction with telecom corporations. That name also appears in the Qwest documents.
This is pretty thin evidence right now, but if true there must be a lot more evidence under a rug somewhere. The administration can be counted on to do its worst to keep these out of a courtroom.
Who cares when it started?? It doesn’t change what they did.
I think you’re actually buying into Bush’s “9/11 changed everything” argument. You’re essentially saying phone tapping before 9/11 was bad, but after 9/11 it’s not as bad.
The spin writes itself. They were being “pro-active” because they were totally aware of the threat posed and flung themselves into defensive efforts. However, this effort proved ineffective, due primarily to Bill Clinton’s blow job.
No, but we seem to both agree it was a bad idea before AND after 9/11. I’m saying, should this prove true, it totally undermines the rationale the administration has offered up to the public for why they did this. It undercuts their claim that they could do this because the executive has expanded powers in time of war. There was no war yet – now what will their excuse be?
I understand what you’re saying. But I still think this is the wrong argument to make. You’re treating the “9/11 changed everything” line as a possibly valid argument, and simply saying it doesn’t apply to this specific case (phone-tapping). But it isn’t a valid argument to begin with!
No, but it does show that you think there’s a difference between the two.
Let’s say someone murdered a Hispanic man, and his only rationale was “I killed him because I hate Mexicans.” Would you spend time showing that the victim was Bolivian, not Mexican, and therefore the rationale for the murder was invalid? Wouldn’t that upset the Mexian-American community?
Let me put it another way. I agree with you that this was a bad program before or after 9/11. However, IMHO, a whole lot of people, including many in Congress, bought into the “9/11 changes everything” idea, and voted support for programs they normally wouldn’t, or so they said. IMHO, what the country needs most of all at this time, is for enough moderate Republican senators and House members to get fed up with Bush and stop voting the party line. It is these people who need irrefutable proof that 9/11 was used as an excuse to justify all kinds of shenigans. Until Congress has the votes to override Bush’s veto, we are all stuck in the Iraq shithole, and we’re all stuck with this imperial presidency.
Yes, that is interesting, though it may not mean much. There’s a pretty good chance it got conceived by some NSA technology wonks, and shot down when it was floated into the political world outside NSA. They might even talked to telecom wonks about what kind of hardware and software would be needed to do it, and the resulting paper trail might well end up in a lawsuit like those that have been filed since. The White House, or one of the Congressional Intelligence committees, might have tossed it as politically or legally unsupportable. Then, in comes the Emperor and Darth Cheney, and it becomes just the right tool in their eyes.
You don’t have to buy into an opponent’s argument to try and negate it. Whatever we may think ourselves, “9/11 changed everything” does resonate with some people. Therefore, if your opponent uses this as an excuse for some action, to show that he was doing it anyway is an entirely pertinent point to make. It’s always the same laundry list of authoritarian wet dreams that get trotted out after every supposedly world changing event; pointing out the blatant opportunism of said authoritarians should be an early port of call for anyone opposed to their goals.
The US government has spied on its citizens long before 9/11 cite, and they will do so long after I am dead and gone. That’s simply what they do. Anyone who thinks they’ve stopped spying on US citizens is naive.
As Kagro X pointed out over at The Great Orange Satan, another implication of this, if true, is that they were already doing all this highfalutin’ illegal surveillance for several months before 9/11 and it failed to stop 9/11.
So the whole “we’ve got to spy on you, or the terrorists will win” argument would turn into “we really really want to spy on you, even though there’s little evidence that it’ll stop the terrorists.”
I come at it from the other direction: it was bad enough that Bush wanted to spy on US phone calls after 9/11, but his initial desire to spy now seems like just a fishing expedition with no cause.