Bruce Shapiro (The Nation): The Wiretapping Tango

[Jack Rabbit]

From The Nation
Dated Thursday May 18

The Wiretapping Tango
By Bruce Shapiro

As more facts emerge in the NSA's warrantless call-tracking scandal, it's clear that this isn't about government abuses alone: It's also a delicate tango between security agencies and telecommunications executives. The government may lead, but its essential partners are the phone companies that own the switches, computers and call-routing software.

To me and other residents of at least one American city, this is a familiar dance. Beginning in 1964 New Haven police persuaded executives of the Southern New England Telephone Company (today part of AT&T) to let officers monitor traffic on the phone company's mainframe. "Ordinary citizens" supposedly had nothing to fear: At first the warrantless taps were aimed at illegal gambling. But as the 1960s drew on and New Haven was roiled by protest, this limited collaboration between law enforcement and the private sectors turned into a massive twenty-four-hour-a-day operation--in its way a primitive, small-city form of data-mining. If someone on the NHPD wiretap list received or made a call, the party on the other end was identified from SNET's records and added to the list. Soon it grew by the hundreds. When the program was shut down in 1971, the list included Black Panthers, law professors, feminists, a movie theater and a dry cleaner, with details of their calls hand-noted on 3-by-5 cards. As with the NSA it was only infighting and a leak to a journalist that exposed the wiretap program and led to a lawsuit against the city and SNET.

By the mid-1970s illegal phone company cooperation with surveillance had become a scandal nationwide. Though no city's taps topped New Haven's, in cities like New York and Chicago, local police red squads routinely relied on friendly telecommunications executives for access to records. Under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI did the same. In 1975 the Senate committee investigating government surveillance activities, headed by Frank Church, revealed that phone companies had for years allowed warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency under the code name Operation Shamrock: computerized monitoring of all telegraphic data into and out of the United States. As Jason Vest of the Project on Government Oversight notes on POGO's blog, in 1976 Representative Bella Abzug did exactly what Senator Arlen Specter is threatening to do today--she subpoenaed top officials of Western Union, ITT and RCA Global.

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