WP,pg1: U.S. Punished Qwest: Company feared secret phone record collection BEFORE 9/11 was illegal

[DeepModem Mom]

Former CEO Says U.S. Punished Phone Firm
Qwest Feared NSA Plan Was Illegal, Filing Says
By Ellen Nakashima and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, October 13, 2007; A01

A former Qwest Communications International executive, appealing a conviction for insider trading, has alleged that the government withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after Qwest refused to participate in an unidentified National Security Agency program that the company thought might be illegal.

Former chief executive Joseph P. Nacchio, convicted in April of 19 counts of insider trading, said the NSA approached Qwest more than six months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to court documents unsealed in Denver this week.

Details about the alleged NSA program have been redacted from the documents, but Nacchio's lawyer said last year that the NSA had approached the company about participating in a warrantless surveillance program to gather information about Americans' phone records.

In the court filings disclosed this week, Nacchio suggests that Qwest's refusal to take part in that program led the government to cancel a separate, lucrative contract with the NSA in retribution. He is using the allegation to try to show why his stock sale should not have been considered improper....

***

Nacchio's account, which places the NSA proposal at a meeting on Feb. 27, 2001, suggests that the Bush administration was seeking to enlist telecommunications firms in programs without court oversight before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The Sept. 11 attacks have been cited by the government as the main impetus for its warrantless surveillance efforts....In May 2006, USA Today reported that the NSA had been secretly collecting the phone-call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by major telecom firms. Qwest, it reported, declined to participate because of fears that the program lacked legal standing....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/12/AR2007101202485_pf.html

[beberocks]

1. Tin foil hat time, but I think this is what * is afraid of

I'm in the LIHOP camp, and I think * illegally tapped the phones, found out about the 9/11 plot, and decided to let it happen for their own benefit. I think they crap their pants and call some phony terrorist plot when the NSA spying comes up because they know it will come out. This theory may be far fetched, but nothing surprises me anymore about how evil this admin is.

[tanyev]

3. Oooh, interesting theory.

I so long for the day when all the truth finally spills out.

[ooglymoogly]

4. There are none so ignorant as those who will not see

or have two brain cells to rub together to do so.

[leveymg]

5. There was a warrantless surveillance program against al-Qaeda in US before 9/11

Here are the details:

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0310/S00257.htm

I agree with about 90% of what you're saying. Until someone involved comes foward with an admission, IMHO, the question of intent is one that is better left to a court of law.

There's certainly more than enough evidence to have indicted Bush, Cheney and their closest national security aides on 3,000 counts of Negligent Homicide.

[TwilightGardener]

2. Simply unbelievable. There is not ONE thing this administration has done

honestly and for the good of the country--not one thing. I'll bet the Senate passes the telecom-immunity bill, and this will all be permanently swept under the rug, even though we now know the entire wiretapping program was a big fat pre-911 LIE used to spy on us for other reasons.

[FarCenter]

6. Phone-call records law is different from wire tap law

There has always been a much lower legal standard for access to billing records, i.e. which number called which other number and for how long, than for access to the content of the call, i.e. the actual speech or data signals sent between parties. I doubt that a warrant was required for access to billing records on a national security grounds.

[struggle4progress]

7. Ex-Qwest Chief Nacchio Claims U.S. `Retaliated' Against Company (Bloomberg)

<edit: title>
Updated: New York, Oct 13 16:40
London, Oct 13 21:40
Tokyo, Oct 14 05:40

Ex-Qwest Chief Nacchio Claims U.S. `Retaliated' Against Company

By David Voreacos

Oct. 13 (Bloomberg) -- ...

Nacchio, convicted in April of insider trading, sought to introduce evidence that the NSA refused Qwest's attempt to work on a project known as ``Groundbreaker'' because he wouldn't join a separate program whose legality he questioned, according to court documents unsealed this week in Denver. U.S. District Judge Edward Nottingham barred the evidence as irrelevant at trial.

``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,'' Nacchio attorney Herbert Stern said in an April 9 court filing. ``Qwest was denied significant work.''

The court disclosures came as the Democratic-controlled Congress is examining the Republican Bush administration's attempts to spy on Americans' phone calls and Internet messages, including the participation of phone companies in NSA's efforts to track terrorist calling patterns ...

Nacchio asserted ``Qwest entered into two classified contracts with the (blacked out) valued at hundreds of millions of dollars, without a competitive bidding process and that in 2000 and 2001, he participated in discussions with high-ranking (blacked out) representatives concerning the possibility of awarding additional contracts of a similar nature,'' Nottingham wrote ...

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a90QIIWrGO8k&refer=home

[struggle4progress]

8. N.S.A. Sought Phone Records Before 9/11, Court Papers Say (NYT)

By SCOTT SHANE
Published: October 14, 2007

... the documents unsealed Wednesday in federal court in Denver, first reported in The Rocky Mountain News on Thursday, are the first claim that pressure on the company to participate in activities it saw as improper came as early as February, nearly seven months before the terrorist attacks ...

At the time of the alleged meeting at N.S.A.’s Fort Meade, Md., headquarters on Feb. 27, 2001, Mr. Nacchio was chairman of the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, whose members include top executives of most of the major communications companies. Like nearly every telecommunications chief executive, he had been granted a security clearance to work with the government on secret projects.

In the court papers, Mr. Nacchio’s lawyers say he and James F. X. Payne, then Qwest’s head of government business, spoke with N.S.A. officials about the agency’s Groundbreaker project, in which N.S.A.’s non-secret information technology would be outsourced to private companies.

At the same meeting, N.S.A. officials made an additional proposal, whose exact nature is not made clear in the censored documents ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/business/14qwest.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin