SocraticGadfly: Verizon helps FBI spy on you for Pentagon

April 09, 2008

Verizon helps FBI spy on you for Pentagon

Will you change your cell phone provider to something else? Will you end your landline service with Verizon-owned MCI? Or at least look at options? Here’s how the FBI’s domestic spying works:
Documents show the FBI has obtained the private records of Americans' Internet service providers, financial institutions and telephone companies, for the military, according to more than 1,000 Pentagon documents reviewed by the ACLU -- also using National Security Letters, without a court order.

The new revelations show definitively that telecommunications companies can transfer “with the click of a mouse, instantly transfer key data along a computer circuit to an FBI technology office in Quantico” upon request.

A telecom whistleblower, in an affidavit, has said he help maintain a high-speed DS-3 digital line referred to in house as the “Quantico circuit,” which allowed an outside organization “unfettered” access to the carrier’s wireless network.

The network he’s speaking of? Verizon.

Verizon denies the allegations vaguely, saying “no government agency has open access to the company's networks through electronic circuits.”

Note the nondenial behind the word “open.” Well, no, FBI has to pay Verizon offices a courtesy call on occasion, do electronic maintenance work on occasion, etc.

Of course, it’s not “open.”

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