[governance] Are All Telephone Calls Recorded and Accessible to the US Government?,,By Glenn Greenwald, Guardian UK

[Riaz K Tayob]

If true, perhaps some international standards on communicative freedom 
may even help Americans as well?


  Are All Telephone Calls Recorded and Accessible to the US Government?

By Glenn Greenwald, Guardian UK

05 May 13

    */A former FBI counterterrorism agent claims on CNN that this is the
    case/*


he real capabilities and behavior of the US surveillance 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/surveillance> state are almost entirely 
unknown to the American public because, like most things of significance 
done by the US government, it operates behind an impenetrable wall of 
secrecy. But a seemingly spontaneous admission this week by a former FBI 
counterterrorism agent provides a rather startling acknowledgment of 
just how vast and invasive these surveillance activities are.

Over the past couple days, cable news tabloid shows such as CNN's Out 
Front with Erin Burnett have been excitingly focused on the possible 
involvement in the Boston Marathon attack of Katherine Russell, the 
24-year-old American widow of the deceased suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. 
As part of their relentless stream of leaks uncritically disseminated by 
our Adversarial Press Corps 
<http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/26/the-awlaki-connection.html>, 
anonymous government officials are claiming 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/investigators-sharpen-focus-on-boston-bombing-suspects-widow/2013/05/03/a2cd9d28-b413-11e2-baf7-5bc2a9dc6f44_story.html?> 
that they are now focused on telephone calls between Russell and 
Tsarnaev that took place both before and after the attack to determine 
if she had prior knowledge of the plot or participated in any way.

On Wednesday night, Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente 
<http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1305/01/ebo.01.html>, a former 
FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to 
discover the contents of past telephone conversations between the two. 
He quite clearly insisted that they could:

    BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail
    they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this
    point. It's not a voice mail. It's just a conversation. There's no
    way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she
    tells them?

    CLEMENTE: "No, /there is a way. We certainly have ways in national
    security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that
    conversation./ It's not necessarily something that the FBI is going
    to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation
    and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

    BURNETT: "So they can actually get that? People are saying, look,
    that is incredible.

    CLEMENTE: "No, /welcome to America. All of that stuff is being
    captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not/."

"All of that stuff" - meaning every telephone conversation Americans 
have with one another on US soil, with or without a search warrant - "is 
being captured as we speak".

On Thursday night, Clemente again appeared on CNN, this time with host 
Carol Costello, and she asked him about those remarks. He reiterated 
what he said the night before but added expressly that "all digital 
communications in the past" are recorded and stored:

Let's repeat that last part: "no digital communication is secure", by 
which he means /not/ that any communication is susceptible to government 
interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: 
all digital communications - meaning telephone calls, emails, online 
chats and the like - are automatically recorded and stored and 
accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to 
define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is.

There have been some previous indications that this is true. Former AT&T 
engineer Mark Klein revealed 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/07/AR2007110700006.html> 
that AT&T and other telecoms had built a special network that allowed 
the National Security Agency full and unfettered access to data about 
the telephone calls and the content of email communications for all of 
their customers. Specifically, Klein explained "that the NSA set up a 
system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary 
Americans with the cooperation of AT&T" and that "contrary to the 
government's depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas 
terrorists . . . much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was 
purely domestic." But his amazing revelations were mostly ignored and, 
when Congress retroactively immunized the nation's telecom giants for 
their participation in the illegal Bush spying programs, Klein's claims 
(by design) were prevented from being adjudicated in court.

That every single telephone call is recorded and stored would also 
explain this extraordinary revelation by the Washington Post in 2010 
<http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/print/>:

    /Every day/, collection systems at the National Security Agency
    intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types
    of communications.

It would also help explain the revelations of former NSA official 
William Binney 
<http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/20/whistleblower_the_nsa_is_lying_us>, 
who resigned from the agency in protest over its systemic spying on the 
domestic communications of US citizens, that the US government has 
"assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about US citizens 
with other US citizens" (which counts only communications transactions 
and not financial and other transactions), and that "the data that's 
being assembled is about everybody. And from that data, then they can 
target anyone they want."

Despite the extreme secrecy behind which these surveillance programs 
operate, there have been periodic reports 
<https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/10/new-nsa-whistleblowers> of 
serious abuse 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/us/16nsa.html?pagewanted=all>. Two 
Democratic Senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, have been warning for 
years 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/us/politics/democratic-senators-warn-about-use-of-patriot-act.html> 
that Americans would be "stunned" to learn what the US government is 
doing in terms of secret surveillance.

Strangely, back in 2002 - when hysteria over the 9/11 attacks (and thus 
acquiescence to government power) was at its peak - the Pentagon's 
attempt to implement what it called the "Total Information Awareness" 
program (TIA) sparked so much public controversy 
<http://www.cato.org/publications/techknowledge/pentagons-total-information-awareness-project-americans-under-microscope> 
that it had to be official scrapped. But it has been incrementally 
re-instituted - without the creepy (though honest) name and 
all-seeing-eye logo - with little controversy or even notice.

Back in 2010, worldwide controversy erupted when the governments of 
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates banned the use of Blackberries 
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-10830485> because some 
communications were inaccessible to government intelligence agencies, 
and that could not be tolerated. The Obama administration condemned this 
move 
<http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/08/02/us-uae-blackberry-usa-idUSTRE67144P20100802> 
on the ground that it threatened core freedoms, only to turn around six 
weeks later and demand that all forms of digital communications allow 
<http://boingboing.net/2010/09/27/obama-administration.html> the US 
government backdoor access to intercept them. Put another way, the US 
government embraced exactly the same rationale invoked by the UAE and 
Saudi agencies: that no communications can be off limits. Indeed, the 
UAE, when responding to condemnations from the Obama administration, 
noted that it was simply doing exactly that which the US government does:

    "'In fact, the UAE is exercising its sovereign right and is asking
    for exactly the same regulatory compliance - and with the same
    principles of judicial and regulatory oversight - that Blackberry
    grants the US and other governments and nothing more,' [UAE
    Ambassador to the US Yousef Al] Otaiba said. 'Importantly, the UAE
    requires the same compliance as the US for the very same reasons: to
    protect national security and to assist in law enforcement.'"

That no human communications can be allowed to take place without the 
scrutinizing eye of the US government is indeed the animating principle 
of the US Surveillance State. Still, this revelation, made in passing on 
CNN, that every single telephone call made by and among Americans is 
recorded and stored is something which most people undoubtedly do not 
know, even if the small group of people who focus on surveillance issues 
believed it to be true (clearly, both Burnett and Costello were shocked 
to hear this).

Some new polling suggests 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/05/01/encouraging-polling-on-civil-liberties/> 
that Americans, even after the Boston attack, are growing increasingly 
concerned about erosions of civil liberties in the name of Terrorism. 
Even those people who claim it does not matter instinctively understand 
the value of personal privacy: they put locks on their bedroom doors and 
vigilantly safeguard their email passwords. That's why the US government 
so desperately maintains a wall of secrecy around their surveillance 
capabilities: because they fear that people will find their behavior 
unacceptably intrusive and threatening, as they did even back in 2002 
when John Poindexter's TIA was unveiled.

Mass surveillance is the hallmark of a tyrannical political culture. But 
whatever one's views on that, the more that is known about what the US 
government and its surveillance agencies are doing, the better. This 
admission by this former FBI agent on CNN gives a very good sense for 
just how limitless these activities are.

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