Phone Companies Paid Millions to Cooperate with NSA

Senators Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, issued a joint statement this week regarding admissions by senior intelligence officials that they did not fully understand the entirety of the NSA’s bulk collection programs.

NSA HQ

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court released a previously classified opinion this week asserting the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) controversial bulk phone log collection program. The 29-page opinion, written by Judge Claire V. Eagan, is the most extensive explanation yet for the massive program, defending the practice on the grounds that it is sanctioned by a provision of the Patriot Act, and that it does not violate the Fourth Amendment since it does not eavesdrop on contents of phone calls. Judge Eagan, a 2001 George W. Bush appointee assigned to the FISA court this year by Chief Justice Roberts, wrote that “any decision about whether to keep it was a political question, not a legal one.” Jameel Jaffer, a senior attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), was unconvinced by the court’s opinion, saying the opinion “only confirms the folly of entrusting privacy rights to a court that hears argument only from the government.”

The ACLU isn’t the only one not reassured by Judge Eagan’s opinion on the program’s legality.Senators Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, issued a joint statement this week regarding admissions by senior intelligence officials that they did not fully understand the entirety of the NSA’s bulk collection programs. After revelations that intelligence officials routinely mislead the FISA court and consistently violated the court’s orders, the Senators argue that, “[i]f the assertion that ineptitude and not malice was the cause of these ongoing violations is taken at face value, it is perfectly reasonable for Congress and the American people to question whether a program that no one fully understood was an effective defense of American security at all. The fact that this program was allowed to operate this way raises serious concerns about the potential for blind spots in the NSA’s surveillance programs. It also supports our position that bulk collection ought to be ended.”

Judge Eagan’s opinion also revealed that no telecommunications company has ever challenged the legality of an NSA surveillance request. While technology companies like Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft have all filed petitions with the FISA court to disclose records proving their objection to the programs, the NSA pays AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon hundreds of millions of dollars for their willing compliance. Matthew Aid argues this means that these private companies “now actually do much of NSA’s SIGINT collection work, for which NSA pays them tens of millions of dollars every year. And the irony is that we American taxpayers pay for this through a series of surcharges, fees and taxes tacked on to our AT&T, Verizon and Sprint long-distance telephone bills.” A Verizon executive went so far as to say tech companies were “grandstanding” in public about their aversion to cooperating with the NSA. However, despite the controversy surrounding the NSA’s surveillance practices, President Obama’s review panel created specifically to reform the NSA’s programs did not discuss making any substantive changes during the panel’s first meeting.

In non-NSA news, while the NSA has the budget to pay telecommunications companies $278 million for user data, the FBI is facing serious government spending cuts. The agency has long agonized over the anticipated budget cuts, and recently decided that the bureau will be forced to shut down their headquarters and nation-wide offices for 10 days over the course of the next year. “Besides the short-term effect on morale, response time and focus on the mission, this will degrade the capabilities of the bureau in the long term as well,” according to former FBI deputy director Tim Murphy. “I think the long-term impact is not being considered by those having this budget debate in Congress. Mistakes will be made down the road because of these cuts, and they will be able to be traced back to these cuts.”

The ACLU is challenging the CIA’s refusal to release any documents on its use of drones in targeted killings. Since the ACLU submitted a FOIA request to the CIA for use of drones for such practices, the CIA has continually refused to list or describe any documents in its possession –in direct opposition to a federal court’s orders. The CIA is not only ignoring the federal courts on the basis that releasing any information would endanger national security, it is continuing to engage in what an appeals courts calls a “pattern of strategic and selective leaks at very high levels of the Government,” prompting the ACLU to state in its brief, “[i]ndeed, the CIA’s response is so obviously deficient that one can only assume that the CIA’s goal is not to prevail on this motion but simply to delay as long as possible the day on which the agency will finally be required to explain what documents it is withholding and why.” More

 

CIA Confirms Role in 1953 Iran Coup

Washington, D.C., August 19, 2013 – Marking the sixtieth anniversary of the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, the National Security Archive is today posting recently declassified CIA documents on the United States' role in the controversial operation.

Shah's Firman

American and British involvement in Mosaddeq's ouster has long been public knowledge, but today's posting includes what is believed to be the CIA's first formal acknowledgement that the agency helped to plan and execute the coup.

The explicit reference to the CIA's role appears in a copy of an internal history, The Battle for Iran, dating from the mid-1970s. The agency released a heavily excised version of the account in 1981 in response to an ACLU lawsuit, but it blacked out all references to TPAJAX, the code name for the U.S.-led operation. Those references appear in the latest release. Additional CIA materials posted today include working files from Kermit Roosevelt, the senior CIA officer on the ground in Iran during the coup. They provide new specifics as well as insights into the intelligence agency's actions before and after the operation.

The 1953 coup remains a topic of global interest because so much about it is still under intense debate. Even fundamental questions — who hatched the plot, who ultimately carried it out, who supported it inside Iran, and how did it succeed — are in dispute.[1]

The issue is more than academic. Political partisans on all sides, including the Iranian government, regularly invoke the coup to argue whether Iran or foreign powers are primarily responsible for the country's historical trajectory, whether the United States can be trusted to respect Iran's sovereignty, or whether Washington needs to apologize for its prior interference before better relations can occur.

Donald N Wilber

Also, the public release of these materials is noteworthy because CIA documents about 1953 are rare. First of all, agency officials have stated that most of the records on the coup were either lost or destroyed in the early 1960s, allegedly because the record-holders' "safes were too full."[2]

Regarding public access to any remaining files (reportedly about one cubic foot of material), the intelligence community's standard procedure for decades has been to assert a blanket denial. This is in spite of commitments made two decades ago by three separate CIA directors. Robert M. Gates, R. James Woolsey, and John M. Deutch each vowed to open up agency historical files on a number of Cold War-era covert operations, including Iran, as a sign of the CIA's purported new policy of openness after the collapse of the USSR in 1991.[3]

A clear sign that their pledge would not be honored in practice came after the National Security Archive filed a lawsuit in 1999 for a well-known internal CIA narrative about the coup. One of the operation's planners, Donald N. Wilber, prepared the account less than a year later. The CIA agreed to release just a single sentence out of the 200-page report.

Despite the appearance of countless published accounts about the operation over the years - including Kermit Roosevelt's own detailed memoir, and the subsequent leak to The New York Times of the 200-page CIA narrative history[4] — intelligence agencies typically refused to budge. They have insisted on making a distinction between publicly available information on U.S. activities from non-government sources and official acknowledgement of those activities, even several decades after the fact.

Kermit Roosevelt

While the National Security Archive applauds the CIA's decision to make these materials available, today's posting shows clearly that these materials could have been safely declassified many years ago without risk of damage to the national security. (See sidebar, "Why is the Coup Still a Secret?")

Archive Deputy Director Malcolm Byrne called for the U.S. intelligence community to make fully available the remaining records on the coup period. "There is no longer good reason to keep secrets about such a critical episode in our recent past. The basic facts are widely known to every school child in Iran. Suppressing the details only distorts the history, and feeds into myth-making on all sides." More