Yahoo has freaked out and initiated take-down proceedings.

My first thought when I read that was “predator drones.”

If Yahoo’s gambit with “copyright” protection works, then we should call ourselves independent contractors and claim all our emails/conversations/web surfing questions are copyrighted and cannot be shared without our permission.

No better proof of the melding of business and government.

You see, these companies only look like telecom companies. Really, they’re telecom and surveillance companies.

Wow! Very well put.

What I find interesting is how completely the telco mindset has changed in 10 years.

I used to work on the hardware-vendor side of the industry, after the Bell system breakup but not too long after. Everything back then was about insuring subscriber security: what you could and could not attach to switching equipment, how the operating systems on the switches were managed, how connection-attempts to the administrative interfaces were logged (on paper), etc. This wasn’t just or even primarily altruistic: it all had to do with either billing and revenue or wiretapping laws.

How did this change happen? Basically, the old-line, home-grown Phone Company managers were replaced by types like Carly Fiorina (who was at Lucent just before the latter’s collapse, if I recall correctly). These generic business types did not know how a telco had been run or what its legal and moral obligations might be. They just knew how to maximize their own compensation in the shortest possible time. They neither knew nor cared about revenue or profit–which is why telcos are largely basket cases now. And they refused to invest in any new technologies, so the internet largely developed free of the telco ethos for security.

How does the Quantico Circuit fit into all this?

A U.S. government office in Quantico, Virginia, has direct, high-speed access to a major wireless carrier’s systems, exposing customers’ voice calls, data packets and physical movements to uncontrolled surveillance, according to a computer security consultant who says he worked for the carrier in late 2003.

“What I thought was alarming is how this carrier ended up essentially allowing a third party outside their organization to have unfettered access to their environment,” Babak Pasdar, now CEO of New York-based Bat Blue told Threat Level. “I wanted to put some access controls around it; they vehemently denied it. And when I wanted to put some logging around it, they denied that.”

As background, James Bamford was on Democracy Now! October 14, 2008, describing the history and means of literally “splitting the beam:” by running fiber optics through prisms, the entire telecom data stream can be duplicated. Worse, Bamford asserts: the contract to tap us was outsourced to just two (2) shadowy companies based in Israel.

And what Mark Klein was talking about, he was a supervisor for twenty-two years over at AT&T, and he discovered this secret room in this facility in San Francisco, this very tall, ten-, twelve-story building out in San Francisco, which is basically the switch, AT&T’s switch for their communications in that part of the country, the sort of western part of the country.

And what happened is that during the 1990s and early in the ’80s and the ’70s, the NSA used to collect information by putting out big dishes and collecting satellite communications that would come down. It was very easy. They put the dishes out; satellite transmits the telephone calls and messages, emails and so forth down to earth; and the satellite picks it up. And then NSA collects it. NSA didn’t have to deal with the telecommunication companies at all, because they could get the information independent of the telecom companies.

Then, in the late ’90s, things began to change, and fiber optics became a big thing for telecommunications. Fiber optics are cables in which the communications are transmitted, not electronically, but by photons, light signals. And that made life very difficult for NSA. It meant the communications, instead of being able to pick them up in a big dish, they were now being transmitted under the ocean in these cables. And the only way to get access to it would be to put a submarine down and try to tap into those cables. But that, from the people I’ve talked to, has not been very successful with fiber-optic cables. So the only other way to really do this is by making some kind of agreement with the telecom companies, so that NSA could actually basically cohabitate some of the telecom companies’ locations. And that’s what happened. NSA began making these agreements with AT&T and other companies, and that in order to get access to the actual cables, they had to build these secret rooms in these buildings.

So what would happen would be the communications on the cables would come into the building, and then the cable would go to this thing called a splitter box, which was a box that had something that was similar to a prism, a glass prism. And the prism was shaped like a prism, and the light signals would come in, and they’d be split by the prism. And one copy of the light signal would go off to where it was supposed to be going in the telecom system, and the other half, this new cloned copy of the cables, would actually go one floor below to NSA’s secret room. So you had one copy of everything coming in and going to NSA’s secret room. And in the secret room was equipment by a private company called Narus, the very small company hardly anybody has ever heard of that created the hardware and the software to analyze these cables and then pick out the targets NSA is looking for and then forward the targeted communications onto NSA headquarters.

AMY GOODMAN: So you have these companies, AT&T and Verizon, that are secretly working with the NSA and tapping Americans’ phone lines, and these companies actually outsource the actual tapping to some little-known foreign companies?

JAMES BAMFORD: Yeah. There’s two major—or not major, they’re small companies, but they service the two major telecom companies. This company, Narus, which was founded in Israel and has large Israel connections, does the—basically the tapping of the communications on AT&T. And Verizon chose another company, ironically also founded in Israel and largely controlled by and developed by people in Israel called Verint.

So these two companies specialize in what’s known as mass surveillance. Their literature—I read this literature from Verint, for example—is supposed to only go to intelligence agencies and so forth, and it says, “We specialize in mass surveillance,” and that’s what they do. They put these mass surveillance equipment in these facilities. So you have AT&T, for example, that, you know, considers it’s their job to get messages from one person to another, not tapping into messages, and you get the NSA that says, we want, you know, copies of all this. So that’s where these companies come in. These companies act as the intermediary basically between the telecom companies and the NSA.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, Jim Bamford, take this a step further, because you say the founder and former CEO of one of these companies is now a fugitive from the United States somewhere in Africa?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, you know, this is a company that the US government is getting all its tapped information from. It’s a company that Verizon uses as its tapping company, its eavesdropping company. And very little is known about these companies. Congress has never looked into any of this. I don’t know—I don’t think they even know that there is—that these companies exist. But the company that Verizon uses, Verint, the founder of the company, the former head of the company, is now a fugitive in—hiding out in Africa in the country of Namibia, because he’s wanted on a number of felony warrants for fraud and other charges. And then, two other top executives of the company, the general counsel and another top official of the parent company, have also pled guilty to these charges.

So, you know, you’ve got companies—these companies have foreign connections with potential ties to foreign intelligence agencies, and you have problems of credibility, problems of honesty and all that. And these companies—through these two companies pass probably 80 percent or more of all US communications at one point or another. And it’s even—gets even worse in the fact that these companies also supply their equipment all around the world to other countries, to countries that don’t have a lot of respect for individual rights—Vietnam, China, Libya, other countries like that. And so, these countries use this equipment to filter out dissident communications and people trying to protest the government. It gives them the ability to eavesdrop on communications and monitor dissident email communications. And as a result of that, people are put in jail, and so forth. So—

AMY GOODMAN: And despite all of this—

JAMES BAMFORD: —this is a whole area—I’m sorry?

AMY GOODMAN: Despite all of this, these telecom companies still have access to the most private communications of people all over America and actually, it ends up, around the world. And at the beginning of the summer [of 2008], the Democrats and Republicans joined together in granting retroactive immunity to these companies for spying on American citizens.

JAMES BAMFORD: Yes….

And we all know how BO voted, and how he and Holder have outdone Bush and his gang.

Then there’s the COFEE takedown order. So, what does COFEE allow?

… law enforcement agencies without on-the-scene computer forensics capabilities can now more easily, reliably, and cost-effectively collect volatile live evidence. An officer with even minimal computer experience can be tutored—in less than 10 minutes—to use a pre-configured COFEE device. This enables the officer to take advantage of the same common digital forensics tools used by experts to gather important volatile evidence, while doing little more than simply inserting a USB device into the computer.

Which is fine if they have a court order, but, if they don’t …

F— this little I touch nuisnce!

I’ve been with Sprint for six years. Each time my two year contract ended they were all over it trying to make a deal, keep the customer, free phone. When my contract ran out six months ago, no phone calls, no offers, no extras. Just called them the other day and they were truly blase as if they did not care whether I stayed or went with another company.

Wonder how much they are making from these government contracts?

Do you think this is all on record or a different set of books and record keeping for these government contracts?