Domestic Taps Smoking Gun? WorldCom Routed US-to-US Calls Through Canada!

[Dunvegan]

Smoking gun alert:

There is an easy way to circumvent the strict "no eavesdropping on US-to-US calls" Bush referenced: secretly route any snooped calls through another country.

It is a method that has already been used and documented in court, by WorldCom, and brought up by AT&T in WorldCom's bankruptcy filing: Route the domestic calls through a second country.

AT&T brought the accusation in 2003 that WorldCom routed US-to-US calls through Canada.

Furthermore, in the AT&T suit against WorldCom, AT&T specifically cites the case of a Democratic Congressman's US-to-US calls being so routed through Canada.

I'm going to post this AT&T press release in it's entirety as press releases from corporations are issued expressly for release and reprint, unlike copyrighted news stories and other such written materials.

For Release Wednesday, August 6, 2003
AT&T Replies To WorldCom's Bankruptcy Court Response

NEW YORK -- In a filing today in U.S. Bankruptcy Court, AT&T said MCI/WorldCom's court filing earlier this week admits to the deception and fraud that AT&T had alleged in its objections to MCI/WorldCom's Plan of Reorganization for emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

AT&T's filing argued that MCI/WorldCom's response of Monday, August 4, purposely avoided addressing the point of AT&T's fraud allegations that the intent of the rerouting of calls was to deceive and defraud AT&T into paying termination fees for the calls.

MCI/WorldCom sought to justify the fraud scheme as legitimate "least cost routing," but AT&T said: "'Least cost routing' involves availing oneself of the lowest access charge available from the terminating carrier, i.e., shopping for the lowest charges from the terminating carrier. That is different in kind from deceptively causing another carrier to pay that terminating access charge," AT&T said.

"We're talking about the difference between shopping for bargains and shopping with somebody else's credit card. The latter is clearly a crime that people can go to jail for," AT&T Chief Counsel James Cicconi said in commenting on AT&T's request for the Bankruptcy Court's permission to seek damages it has suffered as a result of the fraud.

AT&T's filing today also cited additional instances of domestic U.S. Government telephone calls that were routed through Canada for completion, including calls for the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy. On July 28, AT&T cited domestic calling traffic of several U.S. Government agencies, including the Department of State and the Postal Service, as part of the scheme to defraud AT&T and its shareowners.

Further, the AT&T filing included examples of in-state calls between the Wisconsin district offices of U.S. Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wisc.). The offices are pre-subscribed to MCI/WorldCom for long-distance calling, but calls between the offices were routed over AT&T's network after being diverted through Canada.

AT&T's filing today said MCI/WorldCom achieved the deception by:

* Separating out only the calls to the most expensive independent telephone companies, thus reducing the likelihood that the scheme would be discovered;

* Routing the calls through three intermediaries, thus hiding the fact that the calls were MCI/WorldCom's customers;

* Routing the calls through a foreign country, thus further concealing the source and setting up the next step; and

* Taking advantage of the knowledge that upon delivery to AT&T's network, MCI/WorldCom's "customer traffic commingled with literally trillions of minutes of calls on the AT&T network each year."

"Debtors (MCI/WorldCom) were well aware that even if AT&T had known to look, AT&T could not have easily detected Debtors' high-cost calls. Indeed, even after law enforcement notified AT&T of Debtors' fraudulent diversion scheme, it took AT&T weeks to locate the diversions in the ocean of data that AT&T's network generates," AT&T said in its filing today.

Elsewhere in its filing, AT&T said that MCI/WorldCom's description of its actions in admitting diverting traffic through Canada misstate the nature of the scheme. Yet, AT&T said, the admissions MCI/WorldCom made in its filing fall under the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeal's Pattern Jury Instruction for Mail and Wire Fraud, which state in part: "A scheme to defraud is a scheme that is intended to deceive or cheat another and to … cause the loss of money or property to another."

In seeking to justify its fraudulent actions by disclosing that detailed call-routing information traveled along with the voice telephone calls, MCI/WorldCom failed to show it wasn't violating the law, AT&T said.

" … The mere fact that there is disclosure during the course of the scam does not eradicate the swindle," AT&T said. "So too, the mere fact that a carrier discloses call detail as part of a scheme to deceive or an artful stratagem does not in itself eliminate the deception."

AT&T also denied MCI/WorldCom's assertions that it had participated in shifting its costs to another carrier, saying that the instances MCI/WorldCom cited in its filing were not fraudulent activities and that the facts underlying the assertions were either wholly distinguishable from the "Canadian Gateway" scheme or irrelevant to it. (--End AT&T Press Release--)

If the Bush administration wanted to play with semantics and say they haven't snooped on any US-to-US calls (although it's becoming apparent that they have done so in some cases) the simple way would be to bulk route US-to-US calls through a third country (in this case Canada) then call that an "international intercept."

No wonder * went with the "we don't intercept domestic-to-domestic calls." Routing such calls outside of the country between end-points would mean that a simple domestic-only call suddenly becomes an international call (and all this without any knowledge of the caller or callee.)

(Edited to add link to AT&T press release: http://www.att.com/news/2003/08/06-12038 )