In the United States, the only Telecom executive who refused to cooperate with the NSA was imprisoned.
A CEO who resisted NSA spying is out of prison. And he feels ‘vindicated’ by Snowden leaks.
By Andrea Peterson
Washington Post, September 30, 2013
Just one major telecommunications company refused to participate in a legally dubious NSA surveillance program in 2001. A few years later, its CEO was indicted by federal prosecutors. He was convicted, served four and a half years of his sentence and was released this month.
Prosecutors claim Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio was guilty of insider trading, and that his prosecution had nothing to do with his refusal to allow spying on his customers without the permission of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. But to this day, Nacchio insists that his prosecution was retaliation for refusing to break the law on the NSA's behalf.
After his release from custody Sept. 20, Nacchio told the Wall Street Journal that he feels "vindicated" by the content of the leaks that show that the agency was collecting American's phone records.
Nacchio was convicted of selling of Qwest stock in early 2001, not long before the company hit financial troubles. However, he claimed in court documents that he was optimistic about the firm's ability to win classified government contracts — something they'd succeeded at in the past. And according to his timeline, in February 2001 — some six months before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — he was approached by the NSA and asked to spy on customers during a meeting he thought was about a different contract. He reportedly refused because his lawyers believed such an action would be illegal and the NSA wouldn't go through the FISA Court. And then, he says, unrelated government contracts started to disappear.
His narrative matches with the warrantless surveillance program reported by USA Today in 2006 which noted Qwest as the lone holdout from the program, hounded by the agency with hints that their refusal "might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government." But Nacchio was prevented from bringing up any of this defense during his jury trial — the evidence needed to support it was deemed classified and the judge in his case refused his requests to use it. And he still believes his prosecution was retaliatory for refusing the NSA requests for bulk access to customers' phone records. Some other observers share that opinion, and it seems consistent with evidence that has been made public, including some of the redacted court filings unsealed after his conviction.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/09/30/a-ceo-who-resisted-nsa-spying-is-out-of-prison-and-he-feels-vindicated-by-snowden-leaks/
You know what sounds like a bullshit theory? That the NSA wall-to-wall spying on Americans is for their protection.
Going by who gets the info and what they do with it, the connected cronies are making a killing on the market.
Ask Carly Fiorina.
The CEO and the CIA
How Carly Fiorina managed and advised the ‘poobahs’ at Langley.
by JIM GERAGHTY
National Review, May 5, 2015 4:30 PM
One week after 9/11, Michael Hayden, the director of the National Security Agency, the electronic surveillance arm of the U.S. government, had a long list of problems. High on the list was the fact that the NSA needed a ton of new high-tech equipment, particularly servers, right away, to handle a vastly expanded, critically important workload.
Hayden called up the CEO of Hewlett Packard, Carly Fiorina. “HP made precisely the equipment we needed, and we needed in bulk,” says Robert Deitz, who was general counsel at the NSA from 1998 to 2006. Deitz recalls that a tractor-trailer full of HP servers and other equipment was on the Washington, D.C. Beltway, en route to retailers, at the very moment Hayden called. Fiorina instructed her team to postpone the retailer delivery and have the driver stop. An NSA police car met up with the tractor-trailer and the truck proceeded, with an armed escort, to NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.
It was an early moment in the close professional relationship between Hayden and Fiorina. Five years later, President George W. Bush named Hayden director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Upon assuming control at Langley, Hayden decided that he wanted to create an ‘External Advisory Board.’ He once again turned to Fiorina, and she went on to chair that board.
The most obvious knock on Fiorina’s newly announced presidential bid is that she has never been elected to any government office. But during the Bush presidency, Fiorina walked the corridors of the CIA and other high offices of government, assembling recommendations for national-security policy and developing a close working relationship with some of the most powerful officials in the administration. She’s already begun to cite these years in an attempt to counter those critics who say she lacks the experience needed to be commander-in-chief.
When Hayden moved to the CIA, Deitz became his senior counselor. He served as the CIA’s main liaison to the advisory board, although he says Hayden and Fiorina had regular private lunch meetings.
“The board had a lot of egos — these were people from academia, retired three- and four-star generals, big poobahs from private industry,” Deitz remembers. “It was a challenging board to run. She would generally sit quietly, ask questions, but you never got a sense she was dominating or big-footing — but by the end of the meeting, she had gotten exactly what she wanted. . . . Polite, but you couldn’t push her around.”
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417938/ceo-and-cia-jim-geraghty
Well, whaddyaknow?! That explains her qualifications to be pretzeldent.
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