Inside the Feds' Secret Wiretapping Rooms

Although it may appear as if Congress is about to put restraints on the Bush administration's wiretapping programs, the three "reform bills" now up for a vote all paint a deceptive picture of the massive domestic surveillance programs that the government has up and running. Because several ongoing invasion-of-privacy lawsuits could expose the extent of the illegal wiretapping, the administration is seeking via these bills to shunt the lawsuits into a secret court, where they will die.

Earlier this year Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) accused President Bush and the National Security Agency (NSA) of breaking the law by authorizing wiretaps without seeking a judicial warrant. Vice President Cheney quickly went to the Hill to work out a compromise with Sen. Specter. The so-called Specter-Cheney bill would give the president the option -- not the requirement -- to submit his electronic surveillance programs for review by the special secret court created by FISA, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

A contrasting bill sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) affirms that FISA court approval for eavesdropping is the "exclusive" means for authorizing wiretaps in domestic terrorism and espionage cases. And a third proposal by Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) requires only that the administration notify Congress when it conducts wiretaps without a warrant.

All of the proposed bills give the Bush administration more wiretapping flexibility through exceptions, disclosure delays and retroactive warrants. Sen. Specter's bill, which the Justice Department has endorsed, also transfers to a FISA court the 29 ongoing invasion-of-privacy cases filed against telecommunications companies, including AT&T, MCI and Sprint, for cooperating with the Bush administration on warrantless eavesdropping.

How many Americans' phone calls, faxes and e-mails are already being spied upon? Both political parties act as if the number is in the low thousands -- in other words, not us. But the truth is: not even the minority leader of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D- W.V.), has the slightest idea. "Even though Senator Rockefeller could be briefed on a classified basis," says Steven Aftergood, head of the Federation of American Scientists' Government Accountability Project, "he hasn't been given answers to the most basic questions. Senator Rockefeller doesn't know how many people have been subjected to electronic surveillance, he doesn't know what the results of any program have been, he doesn't know what errors have been committed."

A clue to the size of the government's ongoing surveillance programs can be gleaned from the lawsuits that the administration wants transferred to the secret FISA court. In May of 2006, acting on behalf of phone customers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class action against AT&T for colluding with the government by conducting systematic searches without any court order. The lawsuit is now awaiting a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals' ruling, expected in October. A lower court tossed out AT&T's and the government's requests for dismissal.

The lawsuit is based upon a sworn statement by Mark Klein, an AT&T technician for 22 years who oversaw AT&T's WorldNet Internet facilities in San Francisco. According to Klein, AT&T provided NSA agents access to all voice calls, while diverting all the data (e-mail, Web surfing, credit card transactions) crossing the Internet through data-mining equipment installed in a series of secret rooms in San Francisco San Diego, San Jose, Los Angeles, Seattle and other cities.

San Francisco's "secret room," according to Klein, is Room 641A at 611 Folsom St., home of a large AT&T building. High-speed fiber-optic circuits come in on the eighth floor and run down to the seventh, where they connect to routers for AT&T's WorldNet service. These fiber-optic circuits are part of what Klein defines as the vital "Common Backbone" among different carriers.