Say Thanks to Qwest!
Website created by Richard Kastelein
Text by Chris Floyd and Richard Kastelein
It’s not often these days that we have occasion to laud corporate behavior, but the stance taken by the telecom Qwest in resisting the Bush Administration’s covert program to ensnare every single American citizen in a vast web of telephone surveillance deserves our thanks.
Every other telecom sold out the privacy of its customers – literally so, taking money to turn over their phone records to the National Security Agency – but Qwest alone insisted on having a court order before complying with Bush’s unprecedented and “indefensible” (as Newt Gingrich put it) invasion of Americans’ personal lives and business affairs.
Bush’s domestic spies refused to supply any formal legal justification whatsoever for their extraordinary request, beyond the implied “plenary powers” of the “Commander-in-Chief”: the novel – and equally indefensible — doctrine that the Administration had adopted as the basis of what is effectively a presidential dictatorship, beyond the reach of law.
It is, of course, a sad commentary on our times that Qwest should be praised so highly for merely obeying the law of the land. But this is what we’ve come to. Our leaders are lawless, and it is now up to every citizen – including corporate citizens – to embody and enact the laws and values of the Republic, on our own, until Constitutional government can be restored.
One simple act we can take is to support those who take a public stand for the law. You can say thanks to Qwest by posting a comment below (you don’t need to join, or leave an email or website to post – just scroll down and hit the comments link).
And pass this man an email as well:
Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer
David J. Heller
email: Corporate.Compliance@qwest.com
Click here to visit Qwest website
USA Today first broke the story, and now we all know: the National Security Agency has been collecting the private phone records of tens of millions of American citizens since 2001, gathering the tainted bounty of this sinister harvest into “the largest data base ever assembled in the world,” as one insider put it. Under the direction of General Michael V. Hayden — the military spymaster now nominated to head the CIA — the NSA carried out this massive “black op” against the American people in total secrecy, without the court orders clearly required to obtain this information. So how did Hayden and his creepy peepers into America’s privacy get hold of the phone records?
Simple: the major U.S. telecommunications corporations — all but one — turned them over to the government, for money — your money. That’s right: the Bush Administration used your tax dollars to pay the Big Telecoms to hand over your private phone records.
…The sources said the NSA made clear that it was willing to pay for the cooperation. AT&T, which at the time was headed by C. Michael Armstrong, agreed to help the NSA.
So did BellSouth, headed by F. Duane Ackerman; SBC, headed by Ed Whitacre; and Verizon, headed by Ivan Seidenberg. With that, the NSA’s domestic program began in earnest.
If you are among the multitudes who signed up, in good faith, to BellSouth, AT&T or Verizon, expecting your privacy to be protected, as required by laws going back more than seven decades, the record of every phone call you have made in the last four-and-a-half years is now in the hands of a secret government program operating without any genuine oversight or restrictions against abuse. This includes the call records of every government or corporate whistleblower, every investigative journalist digging up government corruption, every political opponent of the Administration’s policies. Imagine how useful it would be for the Bush Administration to type in the name of, say, Seymour Hersh, and find out every government insider he’s talked to on the phone for the past four years?
Rarely has such a powerful, all-pervasive tool for repression been placed in the hands of a government; and rarely has there a been a government which has proven itself less trustworthy to hold such power without abusing it.
After the September 11 attacks in 2001, the Bush Administration decided to ignore the existing laws governing surveillance, in particular the special secret courts set up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. This urge to bypass FISA is not surprising; the secret courts – which had almost never refused a single request for surveillance of terrorst or espionage suspects – had been created in response to widespread government spying on citizens in for decades, a mania for illicit intrusion that reached its height under the disgraced president Richard Nixon.
Two of the greatest proponents of these assaults on civil liberties were high-ranking minions in the Nixon Administration: Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. After Nixon’s ignominious departure, with Congress finally acting to restrain the manifold abuses of the national security system, Cheney and Rumsfeld – now Chief of Staff and Defense Secretary for Gerald Ford – buried investigations of a covert telecommunications spy program remarkably similar to the current NSA scheme under the butt-covering rubric of “executive privilege.” The original FISA restrictions were, in fact, aimed directly at serial abusers of power like Cheney and Rumsfeld. It is no wonder that they discarded these restrictions at the first opportunity once they had returned in glory to the White House.
George W. Bush gave his full authority to the NSA program, whose ostensible purpose is to “data-mine” blind phone numbers — with no names or content of the calls divulged — in search of connections between suspected terrorists. Hayden in turn delegated the responsibility to lower-echelon shift supervisors – as in the Watergate days – further diluting the already soup-thin oversight of the operation. For years, it has been carried out in total secrecy; there is simply no way of knowing how they have used – or abused – this massive database, or what other information, such as call content, they have obtained from the phone companies, or by other means.
The Bush Administration pointedly refrained from using any existing legal mechanism in requesting the call records, when it could have very easily done so and doubtless obtained all the information it sought for the data-mining program. In the absence of any other credible explanation – beyond bland assertions of “trust us, it’s all legal” – we are certainly justified in suspecting that the Administration had purposes for the program which lay outside the scope of FISA or any other law governing domestic surveillance.
But the major telecoms were evidently unconcerned about the lack of legality. Once the NSA dangled a bit of long green in their faces, they passed over the call records without a by your leave. Only Qwest – the often beleaguered telecom with a checkered past and an uncertain legal future hanging over its chief – refused to cooperate without the sensible expedient of a court order. After all, that was the law, and had been since the 1930s. There is no doubt that Qwest, given the appeals to patriotism and national security in the tumultuous days after 9/11, would have willingly complied – if the request had been made in a legal manner.
Qwest’s stand is even more remarkable given the heavy pressure applied by Bush team.
…Trying to put pressure on Qwest, NSA representatives pointedly told Qwest that it was the lone holdout among the big telecommunications companies.
It also tried appealing to Qwest’s patriotic side: In one meeting, an NSA representative suggested that Qwest’s refusal to contribute to the database could compromise national security, one person recalled.
In addition, the agency suggested that Qwest’s foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government.
Like other big telecommunications companies, Qwest already had classified contracts and hoped to get more.
Aside from concerns over legality, morality and liberty, the very utility of the NSA program has also been called into question. The blunderbuss approach of harvesting millions upon millions of phone records to be churned by supercomputers seems wildly at odds with the kind of careful, precise human intelligence and investigative work required to pinpoint the deliberately scattered, deeply buried, small networks of actual terrorists out there. And the already massive extent of the program is evidently just the beginning.
It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA’s activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders, this person added.
…The usefulness of the NSA’s domestic phone-call database as a counterterrorism tool is unclear. Also unclear is whether the database has been used for other purposes.
“Other purposes” is the operative phrase here. Because “data-mining” for terrorists in giant phone record banks is like trying to find microscopic needles in an ever-growing haystack. It is, in a word, impossible, according to expert to Bruce Schneier from Wired Magazine.
This unrealistically accurate system will generate 1 billion false alarms for every real terrorist plot it uncovers. Every day of every year, the police will have to investigate 27 million potential plots in order to find the one real terrorist plot per month.
Raise that false-positive accuracy to an absurd 99.9999 percent and you’re still chasing 2,750 false alarms per day — but that will inevitably raise your false negatives, and you’re going to miss some of those 10 real plots.
This isn’t anything new. In statistics, it’s called the “base rate fallacy,” and it applies in other domains as well. For example, even highly accurate medical tests are useless as diagnostic tools if the incidence of the disease is rare in the general population.
Terrorist attacks are also rare, any “test” is going to result in an endless stream of false alarms. This is exactly the sort of thing we saw with the NSA’s eavesdropping program: the New York Times reported that the computers spat out thousands of tips per month.
Every one of them turned out to be a false alarm. And the cost was enormous — not just for the FBI agents running around chasing dead-end leads instead of doing things that might actually make us safer, but also the cost in civil liberties.
The fundamental freedoms that make our country the envy of the world are valuable, and not something that we should throw away lightly.
So again, we are left with the question: What is the NSA program really about? Who are they really spying on? Remember, we are dealing with an Administration that has already declared – in open court, in Congressional testimony, in internal memos, in executive orders and “presidential signing statements” – that the president has the “inherent authority” as Commander-in-Chief during “wartime” to ignore or reinterpret any law that might restrict his “plenary powers.” We have seen this pernicious doctrine in action for years: it underlies the use of torture throughout the global system of detention centers, secret prisons and the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay that Bush has set up; it underlies Bush’s outrageous claim that he can apprehend anyone on earth and hold them indefinitely, without charges or trial, simply by declaring them, on his own authority, an “enemy combatant,” a “terrorist” or even a “suspected terrorist.”
(For example, the Bush Administration has declared in open court that the U.S. government would be justified in capturing and holding a “little old lady in Switzerland” if she unwittingly gave money to a charity used as a front by terrorists. Deputy Attorney General Brian Boyle made the assertion in a hearing on Dec. 1, 2004, adding the chilling words: “Someone’s intention is clearly not a factor that would disable detention.” This admittedly innocent little old lady would then be subjected to a military tribunal, which alone would decide “whether to believe her and release her” – or keep her locked up.)
So we are dealing with an Administration that openly admits that innocent people can be “legimately” swept up in its vast covert nets and subjected to indefinite imprisonment at the mercy of a military tribunal. And we are supposed to believe that these same officials, willing to go to such draconian lengths, are acting with scrupulous circumspection when handling the private phone records of millions of American citizens? We are supposed to believe they are using this gargantuan NSA program solely to ferret out a few terrorists?
…With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans.
Customers’ names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA’s domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information.
The NSA phone-spy program, which we are now told is only the “tip of the iceberg”, is designed to identify social networks – of any kind. It is far too large to have been created solely to find a few terrorists. It beggars belief – and belies the evidence of the Administration’s behavior over the past five years – to assume that other “social networks” are not also being targeted by the program: Democrats and other political opponents, internal dissidents, activist groups, journalists…basically anyone who is against Bush and the way he is fighting his self-declared, never-ending “War on Terror.”
But the dictatorial powers being claimed under the aegis of this “War” are not new measures in response to an unprecedented emergency – they are old abuses long championed by the most powerful elements in the Bush Administration. These powers of surveillance, secrecy and repression of dissent were being systematically restored by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld junta long before 9/11.
In the end, the NSA program is not about “national security” or fighting terrorists. It is just another front in a long-running war against the liberties of the American people: freedoms which are despised and feared by elites who believe that their power and privilege are the only genuine “national interests.”
Who knows? Tomorrow we may see Qwest in collusion with these elites on some other front. But right now, in this fight, they have been a champion of liberty and deserve our thanks. So go show them some love. But in the words of the late, great Johnny Cash: keep your eyes wide open all the time.
May 16th, 2006 at 5:15 pm
I am dumping AT&T (Southwestern Bell) soon as I find alternative service. Wish I could reward Qwest with my business. (Come to Texas soon!)
May 16th, 2006 at 5:26 pm
Thanks to the people at Qwest that have what it take to stand up for our rights.
May 16th, 2006 at 5:30 pm
Just cancelled my AT&T credit card.Used it for sixteen years,but will not do business with a company that help this adminastration spy on u.s.citizens.
May 16th, 2006 at 6:03 pm
Dear Qwest:
I want to thank Qwest for resisting pressure to provide customer calling records to the administration when they declined to seek legal authorization.
This is a truly frightening time in this country … and for a company’s leadership to stand up forthrightly agains this kind of abuse of power gives me a small ray of hope that what we stand for might survive.
I am looking for phone service alternatives and intend to remove myself from Verizon as soon is practical.
W.S.A.
Baltimore, MD
May 16th, 2006 at 6:13 pm
Thank you for supporting Privacy Rights.
May 16th, 2006 at 6:14 pm
I am proud to be a Qwest customer. Thank you, Qwest, for taking a principled stand against the Bush-league erosion of our Bill of Rights!
May 16th, 2006 at 6:16 pm
Ohh, Qwest… you found a way to make me love you after all.
May 16th, 2006 at 6:26 pm
Thanks!
May 16th, 2006 at 6:30 pm
THank you for being the lone beacon in a sea of unlwfule wiretapping.
May 16th, 2006 at 6:30 pm
Thanks qwest for doing the right thing. I wish you were a provider in Texas and I would make the switch.
May 16th, 2006 at 6:36 pm
Thank you for supporting our privacy rights. I have always had Qwest service and will continue to do so.
May 16th, 2006 at 6:46 pm
QWest, you are the rare leader of these days.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR COURAGE TO DO THE RIGHT THING!!!!
May 16th, 2006 at 6:46 pm
A little odd perhaps, but thanks for complying with the law?
May 16th, 2006 at 6:49 pm
I actually already e-mailed Qwest a thank you when the story broke, before I heard of this site. When I first started reading the story, before I read that Qwest didn’t sell me out I thought, that’s it, I am canceling phone service. I was proud and happy to be a Qwest customer after I read the entire story. I am just an average American nothing to hide or worry about with my phone records, but the idea that the government is doing this with no supervision, well that smacks of Nazi Germany to me. I thank you today for being a moral company that safeguards my privacy as you are charged to do under the law. I have passed the story along to countless friends and relatives urging them to leave their phone companies if they do not have Qwest. In the long run the companies that you cannot trust will have their clientele leave them. Then I guess there’s nothing to spy on….
May 16th, 2006 at 6:51 pm
I don’t use Qwest. I don’t have them available as I am not in their footprint. I do however applaud their actions of protecting the privacy of their clients. I am dissappointed that Verizon seems to have not done so.
May 16th, 2006 at 6:56 pm
I’ve cancelled my ISP account with AT&T and will cancel my Verizon Cell account as soon as the current term expires.
I am glad I have QWEST as my local phone company.
THANK YOU QWEST for standing up and doing the right thing.
May 16th, 2006 at 7:13 pm
thanks qwest. i’m ashamed of all the other phone service carriers. i’ll look into qwest service when my cingular contract expires.
May 16th, 2006 at 7:35 pm
I appreciate that your company will stand up to the abuse of power of this administration.
May 16th, 2006 at 7:40 pm
Thank you so much! I hope other businesses will learn from your company’s courage.
May 16th, 2006 at 7:50 pm
I am disturbed by the sheep mentality of the American people. I wonder what it will take for American to wake up and realize that our rights are slipping away. People in other countries probably never thought their government would cross the line until they were dragged from their homes in the middle of the night. Thanks Qwest for being the lighthouse for those of us stranded is the revolting sea of denial.
May 16th, 2006 at 8:40 pm
Qwest is getting too much credit for doing the right thing; they did it for the publicity. Since broadband phone services have become mainstream, their customers are leaving in droves. I’ve lived all over the US, and Qwest’s reliability and customer service are the worst I’ve ever encountered.
May 16th, 2006 at 8:43 pm
Since we already have a FISA court that is being bypassed (for national security). I guess it would be appropriate to have a DISA court for our of our domestic surveillance for customers outside Qwest territory. I’m glad glad that Joe Nacchio did something right!
May 16th, 2006 at 8:44 pm
Thanks Qwest! Allah will bless you and reward you for your assistance in the jihad against the west.
As a reward al-qaeda will now switch all of it’s business to you. We will need to make a bulk purchase of cell phones. Do you have a discounted replacement purchase plan in case one of our cell phones is destroyed?
May 16th, 2006 at 9:33 pm
Thank you Qwest, for following the law of the land.
May 16th, 2006 at 9:40 pm
Thanks Qwest!
May 16th, 2006 at 10:23 pm
Thanks for not being a sell out. I am glad now I have Qwest.
May 16th, 2006 at 10:24 pm
THANK YOU FOR FOLLOWING THE LAW! IT IS A SAD DAY WHEN THAT IS THE EXCEPTION AND NOT THE RULE!
May 16th, 2006 at 10:50 pm
SalAssalamu alykom,
Thank you Qwest!!
Allah Akhbar!! Qwest Akhbar!!!
May 16th, 2006 at 11:17 pm
Just wanting to say thank you Qwest, we have been looking at shutting off our ground line lately but have decided to not do so. Cannot wait till you get your WiMax up in Denver and come down to Colorado Springs with it
.
May 16th, 2006 at 11:25 pm
Thank you Qwest for respecting the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. Enough is enough! There is no reason at all for the N.S.A. to be sying warrentlessly on millions of Americans under the guise of catching a few terrorists. This is really just a right-wing government ploy to spy on and thereby control racial and ethnic minorities, political critics of the Bush regime of all races (patriots), for the purposes of strengthening the fascist regime already in place. Let’s organize a national boycott of BellSouth, Verizon, MCI and AT&T and let our money speak for us!
May 16th, 2006 at 11:39 pm
Thanks for making us all LESS safe. What if the next attack came your way?? Since you Don’t want to participate, how about we save $ and leave YOU unprotected?
May 17th, 2006 at 12:03 am
Oh my goodness! Our Constitution is being shredded to itsy bitsy pieces, but you are protecting us. Thank you! You’re not our government, which should be protecting us from this, but we appreciate your honest practices. Thank you for obeying the law.
As to Stan Henderson, whom I see does not approve of your actions, sir, the war on terror is a war that can not be won. It is a war on an IDEA. You can not win a war on anger or a war on liberalism or a war on communism. THESE ARE IDEAS, and as long as people can still think for themselves, a war on an idea can not be won. This war on terror is a very well executed maneuver by the administration and Republicans in general to gain more powers than the Constitution allows and to keep those powers by perpetuating the same fears that you express in your comment.
May 17th, 2006 at 12:09 am
What a bunch of horse hockey. Qwest sold my name to every telemarketer in the country prior to the do-not-call list. Then they tried to charge me for plans to reduce the numbers of calls I received from them. Now when the government comes calling to help protect me from terrorists, Qwest suddenly decides there is one organization to whom they won’t supply numbers. Probably because they couldn’t charge for it.
May 17th, 2006 at 12:16 am
Thank-you Qwest for doing the right thing and saying no to the government, By obeying the law your customers can be proud of your company. Thanks again for standing up for the constitution.
May 17th, 2006 at 12:51 am
Thank you, thank you, thank you!!! I also emailed customer service when I found out!
May 17th, 2006 at 12:54 am
In any instance, protecting the rights of the people is an admirable action. But in our time, Qwest’s actions ought to be commended on an entirely separate level.
As we all continue to witness the Bush administration’s ineptitude and impracticality . . . its failure to protect America by hardly acknowledging the wishes of all its citizens; its constant infringement upon our rights through unlawful actions; its continuing lies, unfortunately now out of necessity in order to cover up previous lies . . . one question stands out above all: can somebody in office please take responsibility for something they have miscalculated or failed to disclose or just flat out lied about? At the very least, can someone reference that mistakes have been made? And please, not in the political way, which addresses only part of the problem.
Past blunders by this administration and its continuance to move forward despite never addressing the full scope of the problem is coming at a severe cost to our country and us as people. There has been significant damage to the elements that make our nation so great, like the constitution and the rights we possess as citizens. Even more harm has occurred to our spirits, as we live in constant fear of practically everything while having complete distrust in our government’s ability to tell the truth, yet alone perform its duties.
One more thing: can somebody tell me what happened to our system of checks and balances and why is it failing so miserably? It seems as though these problems will only continue to manifest if the other branches continue to liberally check our powerful executives.
All that said, hopefully we can all come to the realization of the potential gravity of a stance like Qwest’s, a stance taken by a corporation that stands up to our misguided government. If only more similar ones could occur, starting with us individuals and up the big corporations, then, and only then, can we deter this Administration’s poor decisions and get our nation back on the right track, back to being a government by the people and for the people.
Thank you Qwest for being the leader that hopefully more will follow!
May 17th, 2006 at 1:09 am
Thanks for upholding the law that protects us. I’ll be a customer for years to come.
May 17th, 2006 at 1:44 am
Just sayin’ thanks; you guys behave like real Americans.
May 17th, 2006 at 1:58 am
There is more than meets the eye. QWEST is involved with the NSA, Seek and you will find….
DEEP THROAT
May 17th, 2006 at 2:02 am
Thank you so much for upholding our privacy!! I am outraged by the constant trampling of our rights by this Administration.Its very commendable to see that even when tempted by money you did not sell our privacy. I am and will continue to be one of your costumer. Thank you!!
May 17th, 2006 at 2:04 am
I know what you know. There is more to this story and the MSM is missing it.
Go to Westfields and you will get more clues….
May 17th, 2006 at 2:17 am
QWEST is a front corporation for the NSA–the plan has worked. You all are being played. WAKE UP!!!!
May 17th, 2006 at 2:20 am
I dont get what it is all about! Most Phone companies worldwide are required by LAW to store Call Data Records. That is part of consumer protection in case of disputes over phone bills. So your data (maybe for a year) is already logged. And Phone company emplyees have access to the data.
So it is not the issue if collection of Call Data Records is legal or not, it is how this data is being used.
I dont think that the NSA cares about a man calling his girlfriend (scanning through hundred of Million of CDRs), but they care more about the calls going to and from suspect phone numbers. Well, they might even get court orders to allow them to use the information.
It is funny how people think that THEY are the focus of all attention. But rest assure, they do not care about where YOU order your Pizza.
Remember the London bombings? I did not see any complains when the bombers were apprehended based on videos from the CCTV cameras that monitor most of London.
And QWest. How many months do you keep the CDRs and how many people have access to them?
May 17th, 2006 at 2:22 am
THINK FOR YOURSELF. QUESTION AUTHORITY.
May 17th, 2006 at 2:25 am
Don’t get fooled again….
May 17th, 2006 at 2:25 am
Thanks/
Do you offer services in CA ?
May 17th, 2006 at 2:34 am
The MSM is missing a bigger story and QWEST is right at the center of it. Let’s try some investigative reporting and discover the REALSTORY
May 17th, 2006 at 3:42 am
We are delighted to congratulate Qwest for “doing the right thing” and acting in accordance to the law of the land. As even more loyal customers, we celebrate independent thinking in the West!
May 17th, 2006 at 5:49 am
Everyone should be careful visiting a web site like this as Bush may be spying on it.
May 17th, 2006 at 6:55 am
Bush’s spying program could be called “no peep left behind”