In any case, the Feb 6 story was not politically timed. Between that story and some of the filings related to a class-action lawsuit filed against ATT (http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/att/), you can get a fairly good understanding of the mechanics and procedures.

Rather than law enforcement operating as it usually does, approaching the telecom with a name or a number or an account, the government pick targets at random, querying the database, for example, for everyone in the 865 area code placing or receiving a call routed to Afghanistan in Oct 2002.

This may seem justified, but queries could also select everyone in who visited sayuncle.com in Feb 2004 on ATT switches and fibers. The universe of potential queries is far larger than the universe of legitimate terror-related queries. All that prevents an NSA worker from abusing the power is each individual worker’s goodwill and integrity. No court oversees this aspect of the process.

How NSA proceeds from systemwide queries to individual surveillance is not clear. Whether they can scan content of communications is not clear. They could potentially be duplicating traffic and filtering out messages containing keywords or using voice-recognition software to detect what language is being spoken. Again, there would be a small universe of legitimate targets and filters within a much larger universe. Where in the process a judge is allowed oversight is not clear.

Ordinary citizens may have little to worry about even if these powers were and are abused, but all manner of potential abuses exist. A business with political connections could obtain information about competitors. Candidates, reporters, lawyers all could suffer from loss of privacy.

From my reading of the various articles and court filings, there seems to be a great deal of potential for abuse and little reason to rule out abuses having occured. I believe I am justified in expecting adequate oversight and record-keeping to allow an investigator to ascertain whether abusive queries or surveillance has occured. I believe the onus is on the Executive Branch to justify its actions, not on potential victims to detect and prove they were illegally targeted.

EFF has attempted to file evidence of its allegations against ATT in its class-action lawsuit, but DOJ demanded the records be sealed, then demanded they not be filed at all. The evidence appears to be testimony of a former ATT engineer and physical documents supporting his claims. ATT has demanded documents it considers confidential and proprietary be returned and the former employee identified.

cleveressss… .my preciousssss….

Note that it must be from the FBI, but meh thinks it’s a minor point now.

Also, if this is accurate and applies, then QWest is (was) in violation.

Non-denial denials.