Global Crossing spokesman Tom Topalian said "99 percent of wiretapping is done at a local phone company level" instead of at backbone providers. Topalian declined to answer questions about NSA access, and added: "All U.S. carriers have to comply with the CALEA act, and Global Crossing complies with CALEA." (CALEA is a 1994 federal law requiring certain telecommunications providers to make their networks wiretap-friendly for domestic law enforcement, not intelligence agencies.)
Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., last month sent a letter (click for PDF) to companies including Google, Yahoo, EarthLink, Verizon and T-Mobile asking them if they cooperated with the NSA. News.com asked similar questions, but expanded the number of companies to include backbone and submarine cable providers.
Among the companies that responded, some offered far more detail than others. Les Seagraves, EarthLink's chief privacy officer, said: "We've never even been asked to give information without the benefit of a subpoena or a court order behind it. And our policy is to require a subpoena or court order, basically to require a court of law behind the inquiry."
"We're very interested in protecting our customers' privacy and balancing that with our duties to comply with the law," Seagraves added. "Our way to balance that is to definitely make sure we have a valid legal request before we release any information."
Comcast spokesman Tim Fitzpatrick said the company "will only provide customer information pursuant to a valid court order and only if Comcast's records contain information sufficient to identify the customer account on the (date or dates) listed in the court order."
A representative of Cox Communications, David Grabert, said: "Cox has never received a request for information or a wiretap that was not accompanied by a warrant."
NSA's history of industry deals Louis Tordella, the longest-serving deputy director of the NSA, acknowledged to overseeing a similar project to intercept telegrams as recently as the 1970s. It relied on the major telegraph companies including Western Union secretly turning over copies of all messages sent to or from the United States.
"All of the big international carriers were involved, but none of 'em ever got a nickel for what they did," Tordella said before his death in 1996, according to a history written by L. Britt Snider, a Senate aide who became the CIA's inspector general.
The telegraph interception operation was called Project Shamrock. It involved a courier making daily trips from the NSA's headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., to New York to retrieve digital copies of the telegrams on magnetic tape.
Like today's eavesdropping system authorized by Bush, Project Shamrock had a "watch list" of people in the U.S. whose conversations would be identified and plucked out of the ether by NSA computers. It was intended to be used for foreign intelligence purposes.
Then-President Richard Nixon, plagued by anti-Vietnam protests and worried about foreign influence, ordered that Project Shamrock's electronic ear be turned inward to eavesdrop on American citizens. In 1969, Nixon met with the heads of the NSA, CIA and FBI and authorized a program to intercept "the communications of U.S. citizens using international facilities," meaning international calls, according to James Bamford's 2001 book titled "Body of Secrets."
Nixon later withdrew the formal authorization, but informally, police and intelligence agencies kept adding names to the watch list. At its peak, 600 American citizens appeared on the list, including singer Joan Baez, pediatrician Benjamin Spock, actress Jane Fonda and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Details about Project Shamrock became public as part of a Senate investigation of the NSA. Telegraph companies participating in the program initially balked when questioned by Senate investigators. But documents turned over by the NSA "cast doubt on the veracity of the companies' claims that they could find no documentation pertaining to Shamrock," wrote Snider. "After all, this had concerned the highest levels of their corporate management for at least four years."
Another apparent example of NSA and industry cooperation became public in 1995. The Baltimore Sun reported that for decades NSA had rigged the encryption products of Crypto AG, a Swiss firm, so U.S. eavesdroppers could easily break their codes.
The six-part story, based on interviews with former employees and company documents, said Crypto AG sold its compromised security products to some 120 countries, including prime U.S. intelligence targets such as Iran, Iraq, Libya and Yugoslavia. (Crypto AG disputed the allegations.)
"Only a very few top executives" The extent of the NSA's surveillance project in operation today remains unclear. Attorney General Gonzales has stressed that the program intercepts e-mail and phone conversations only when "one party to the communication is outside the United States."
In his book titled "State of War," New York Times reporter James Risen wrote: "The NSA has extremely close relationships with both the telecommunications and computer industries, according to several government officials. Only a very few top executives in each corporation are aware of such relationships."
Tapping into undersea copper and fiber-optic cables where they make landfall would be one way to create a virtual web of surveillance that can snare Internet packets or voice communications when they traverse U.S. borders. One benefit for the government is that one participant in the conversation is likely to be overseas--permitting Gonzales and the NSA to stress the interception's international nature.
Another method would be to seek the cooperation of backbone providers with networks entirely within the United States. That could be done with a tap hooked up to the switches at a telephone company or backbone provider, said Phill Shade, a network engineer for WildPackets who is the company's director of international support services. WildPackets sells network analysis software.
"The tap essentially splits off a copy of the traffic--it would literally take a copy of all the traffic as it moves through the wire," Shade said. "Picture a capital letter 'Y' in your head...One copy goes back out the regular wire on the right side of the wire, and the copy you're interested in splitting goes off the left side of the Y to you. These are very common networking devices, used in networks all over the world."
The tap's exact location may matter. Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican who is convening Monday's hearing, has asked Gonzales to respond to a series of questions about the legality of the program. One question Specter is posing: If intercepted calls are "routed through switches which were physically located on U.S. soil, would that constitute a violation of law or regulation restricting NSA from conducting surveillance inside the United States?"
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