NSA Using "Backdoor Access" To Telecommunication Switches

Today's installment of the extra-legal NSA spying scandal is a report by the New York Times that the National Security Agency has a relationship with major telecommunications companies to allow U.S. government COMINT, SIGINT, and ELINT activities on U.S. located international switching junctions for telephone and internet communications.

This is not really news. The NSA has had (and used) this capability since the 1960's. This is the reason that the world's internet backbone is located in Northern Virginia. The state of Virginia has the nation's most lax laws regarding the recording of telephone communications. In the age of the high speed internet, the issue of widespread data mining again rears it's ugly head.

The Times article provides some interesting tidbits about this program:

A former technology manager at a major telecommunications company said that since the Sept. 11 attacks, the leading companies in the industry have been storing information on calling patterns and giving it to the federal government to aid in tracking possible terrorists.

"All that data is mined with the cooperation of the government and shared with them, and since 9/11, there's been much more active involvement in that area," said the former manager, a telecommunications expert who did not want his name or that of his former company used because of concern about revealing trade secrets.

I wager that this expert is less concerned with "trade secrets" than with being prosecuted for revealing classified information. The same problem is encountered with this next excerpt:

Several officials said that after President Bush's order authorizing the N.S.A. program, senior government officials arranged with officials of some of the nation's largest telecommunications companies to gain access to switches that act as gateways at the borders between the United States' communications networks and international networks. The identities of the corporations involved could not be determined.

This is not the entire truth, the covert arrangement with "some of the nation's largest telecommunications companies" may have increased since 9-11, but the basics have been in place for decades. In fact, the United States was known to have intercepted every telegram from Western Union for many years. The ostensible reason to have this capability is to facilitate eavesdropping when authorized by a court. "The identities of the corporations involved could not be determined." False too, but here even I am not willing to risk the ramifications of specifying to whom the Times is alluding.

The Times, of course, gives the government a legal loophole:

One outside expert on communications privacy who previously worked at the N.S.A. said that to exploit its technological capabilities, the American government had in the last few years been quietly encouraging the telecommunications industry to increase the amount of international traffic that is routed through American-based switches.

The loophole is that it is perfectly legal for NSA to intercept foreign communications. It is when possible interception of American communications (without a warrant) is considered that the government gets onto shaky ground.