A question of cause and effect....

Glenn Greenwald's has an excellent post about NSA wiretapping and what we don't know.

Exhibit A in all of this are the documents that fell out of the legal defense of Quest former CEO, Joseph Nacchio.

One of them is citing a court case in New York (Exhibit F in the pdf) that contains the following alarming text (emphasis added):

Defendant ATT's Construction of a Call Monitoring Center for the Exclusive Use of the NSA.

81. Within eleven (11) days of the onset of the Bush administration, and at least seven (7) months prior to the attacks of September 11, 2001, defendant ATT began development of a center for monitoring long distance calls and internet transmissions and other digital information for the exclusive use of the NSA.

82. The center was put into development by ATT following a proposal by the NSA for the construction and development of a network operations center identical to ATT’s own network operations center located in Bedminster, New Jersey for the exclusive use of the NSA.

83. The NSA proposal was accepted by the ATT sales division and referred to ATT Solutions, an ATT project development division situated in Floraham Park, New Jersey.

84. The NSA proposal sought construction of a duplicate ATT Network Operations Center for the exclusive use of the NSA with the capacity to monitor all calls and internet traffic placed on the ATT long distance network, as well as ATT’s wide area, fiber optic, T-1, T-3, T-5 and high speed data networks.

85. Such a data center would also enable the NSA to tap into any call placed on the ATT network and to monitor the contents of all digital information transmitted over the ATT network.

86. The project was described in the ATT sales division documents as calling for the construction of a facility to store and retain data gathered by the NSA from its domestic and foreign intelligence operations but was to be in actuality a duplicate ATT Network Operations Center for the use and possession of the NSA that would give the NSA direct, unlimited, unrestricted and unfettered access to all call information and internet and digital traffic on ATT’s long distance networks.

So - eleven days after the Bush administration takes office - the telcos are building the infrastructure to listen in to everything and everyone.

Partisans will say the Bush administration hit the ground running - but it's entirely plausible that they were hopping on the bus. Greenwald's observations about the hand-in-glove relationship between the Feds and the Telcos suggests this.

Who's running who? or was this just a happy coincidence for the neocons?

A benign way to view this was that the intelligence agencies were simply modernizing their infrastructure to deal with the internet age - and that might be some comfort if there was some meaningful oversight taking place.

It's abundantly clear that oversight is not and has not been taking place. And now Congress wants to immunize the Telcos retroactively. How about we find out what they did first? Or at least do a reconciliation angle where they get immunity from litigation and prosecution in exchange for a full and complete accounting of what was and is taking place? Plus oversight.

It's a sucky deal, but at least it would set the stage for doing this crap right from now on.