FBI Disclaims Material Support for Terrorism Prosecutions — for White People

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Tara McElvey wrote a piece for the Beeb coming close to espousing a very (dangerous, IMO) British view: that the FBI should criminalize white supremacists’ speech the way they have Islamic terrorists’.

[Frazier Glenn Miller’s] writings are a reminder of the virulence in white supremacist views. Earlier this month a married couple, Jerad and Amanda Miller (no relation to Frazier Glenn), shot and killed three people in Nevada.

The couple was steeped in white-supremacist ideology and spoke openly about their views. Police said they placed a swastika on the body of one of the victims.

Some wonder whether authorities were too easy on Frazier Glenn Miller before the killings – and are too soft on the white supremacists in the US.

The piece is most interesting for the quotes from FBI’s spokesperson, which falsely suggests it doesn’t target groups as groups.

Paul Bresson, a spokesman for the FBI, said: “We don’t target groups for who they are. If you want to be a white supremacist – legally there’s nothing wrong with that.

“What we’re concerned about is breaking the law.”

[snip]

As Bresson said: “There’s nothing illegal about being weird.”

Anti-Semitism and extremist ideology seem to play a role in the violence, but Bresson and other officials say that knowing when a white supremacist – or anyone – will explode is beyond their purview.

This is, of course, bullshit. For groups named as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, the FBI does target groups for who they are, under well-worn material support laws. But even without membership in an FTO, the FBI routinely sets up stings to catch young men to precipitate their “explosion” (invariably using inert bombs).

To be fair, the FBI also set up a bunch old white men in the Waffle House plot, in part because they had an informant affirmatively trying to work off his sex crime charges by setting up fellow anti-government activists.

But the FBI’s approach to both groups deserves reconsideration. If the FBI believes it’s not in the job of precipitating personal explosions, it should stop doing so, and instead investigate actual crimes (as Bresson says they do).

In the case of Miller, McElvey misses a key detail. The FBI did not have just his speech. The had — and DOJ had already used — his open support for the MLK bomber, Kevin Harpham, as evidence of criminality. Miller already supported the use of violence against African Americans.

The difference,  of course, is that FBI also called that a “hate crime,” not terrorism. And as a result, treated Miller’s support for terrorism as a First Amendment issue rather than a crime issue.

PCLOB Ignores Glaring Section 702 Non-Compliance: Notice to Defendants

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I will have far more to say about PCLOB once I finish my working thread. But there’s one glaring flaw in the report’s claim that the government complies with the statute.

Based on the information that the Board has reviewed, the government’s PRISM collection complies with the structural requirements of the statute.

But here’s the report’s discussion of what happens with aggrieved persons — those prosecuted based in information derived from Section 702 information.

Further, FISA provides special protections in connection with legal proceedings, under which an aggrieved person — a term that includes non-U.S. persons — is required to be notified prior to the disclosure or use of any Section 702–related information in any federal or state court.447 The aggrieved person may then move to suppress the evidence on the grounds that it was unlawfully acquired and/or was not in conformity with the authorizing Section 702 certification.448 Determinations regarding whether the Section 702 acquisition was lawful and authorized are made by a United States District Court, which has the authority to suppress any evidence that was unlawfully obtained or derived.449 

But for 5 years after the passage of the law, the government never once gave defendants notice they were aggrieved under Section 702. It lied to the Supreme Court about not having done so. And even while it has since given a limited number of defendants — like Mohamed Osman Mohamud — notice, there are others — David Headley, Najibullah Zazi and Adis Medunjanin, and Khalid Ouazzani — who are known to be aggrieved under Section 702 who have never received notice. Finally, there is the case of the Qazi brothers, which seems to be a case where the government is parallel constructing right in the face of the magistrate.

PCLOB said that the government is generally in compliance with the statute. And yet, it made no mention of known, fairly egregious violations of the statute.

That suggests the report as a whole may be flawed.

“Trap and Trace Confidentiality” and National Dragnets

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As a number of outlets are reporting, ACLU liberated some emails catching Florida cops agreeing to lie about the Stingray devices used to capture suspects.

As you are aware for some time now, the US Marshalls and I believe FDLE have had equipment which enables law enforcement to ping a suspects cell phone and pin point his/her exact location in an effort to apprehend suspects involved in serious crimes. In the past, and at the request of the U.S. Marshalls, the investigative means utilized to locate the suspect have not been revealed so that we may continue to utilize this technology without the knowledge of the criminal element. In reports or depositions we simply refer to the assistance as “received information from a confidential source regarding the location of the suspect.” To date this has not been challenged, since it is not an integral part of the actual crime that occurred.

The email goes on to instruct that “it is unnecessary to provide investigative means to anyone outside of law enforcement.”

But i’m most interested in the subject line for this email: “Trap and Trace Confidentiality.”

That seems to confirm what ACLU and WSJ have reported earlier this month. Law enforcement are obtaining location data under Pen Register or Trap and Trace orders, meaning they’re claiming that location data are simply metadata.

That (and the arrogant parallel construction) is problematic for a lot of reasons, but given two developments on the national dragnet, I think we should be newly concerned there, too.

As I have noted, several months after NSA’s Pen Register/Trap and Trace authority was shut down, FBI still had an active PRTT program from which NSA was obtaining data.

PRTT2

 

And not only does it seem that the government plans to resume some kind of PRTT dragnet, but there’s reason to believe they’re still hiding one.

The thing is, I have perhaps mistakenly always assumed these PRTT programs involved the collection of Internet metadata off telecom backbones. While I’m sure they collect large amounts of Internet metadata somehow, I realize now that they might also be operating (or planning to operate) large scale PRTT location programs. Remember, too, that Ron Wyden was asking provocative questions about the intelligence community’s use of cell location data just days before this classification guide.

Mind you, the Quartavious decision might make that impossible now.

But given the USM apparently concerted effort to hide the fact that PRTT equates to cell location orders, we should at least consider whether the government operates more systematic location programs.

Richard Posner Prepares to Overrule the Intent of Congress, and Other FISA in Court Stories

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While the focus on NSA related issues will be on Washington DC today, with activist events, a debate at Brookings, and a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, yesterday it was in several courtrooms.

In Chicago DC, Richard Posner reportedly seemed intent on finding a way to overturn Sharon Johnson Coleman’s order that Adel Daoud’s lawyers should be able to review the FISA materials leading to the investigation into him. It seems Posner is not all that interested in Congress’ intent that, in some cases, defendants would be able to review FISA warrants.

While she also reportedly seemed inclined to overturn Coleman’s decision, Ilana Diamond Rovner at least recognized the clear intend of Congress to permit reviews in some circumstances.

Another of the appeals court panelists, Judge Ilana Diamond Rovner, added that Coleman appeared to have “discarded” applicable FISA law and come up with her own justification for opening the records.

Rovner noted in a question for Ridgway that when Congress enacted the FISA law in the 1970s, it could have clearly indicated defense attorneys should never get access to the records. But it didn’t do that, she said.

“Can you give me any scenario where disclosure (to the defense) would be necessary?” Rovner asked.

“It would be a rare circumstance,” Ridgway, the assistant U.S. attorney, responded.

As I noted, the Defense made a very good argument that Congress intended review in such cases as this one.

Perhaps most stunning, however, is the way everyone but a big team of government prosecutors got booted from the court room.

As the arguments concluded, Judge Richard Posner announced the public portion of the proceedings had concluded and ordered the stately courtroom cleared so the three-judge panel could hold a “secret hearing.” Daoud’s attorney, Thomas Anthony Durkin, rose to object, but Posner did not acknowledge him. Deputy U.S. marshals then ordered everyone out – including Durkin, his co-counsel and reporters.

Only those with the proper security clearance — including U.S. Attorney Zachary Fardon, his first assistant, Gary Shapiro, and about a dozen FBI and U.S. Department of Justice officials – were allowed back in the courtroom before it was locked for the secret session.

Durkin, a veteran Chicago lawyer, said outside the courtroom he was not notified in advance that there would be a secret hearing and called the move unprecedented.

“Not only do I not get to be there, but I didn’t even get to object,” Durkin said. “I had to object over the fact that I couldn’t even make an objection.”

I suspect Posner used the period to conduct his own review of the FISA materials, substituting his judgment for Coleman’s, so as to uphold DOJ’s flawless record of never having their FISA worked checked.

But don’t worry: NSA  defenders will point to this and claim has been thoroughly vetted.

Meanwhile, in Oregon, where Mohamed Osman Mohamud is challenging what increasingly looks like his discovery off a back door search, the government appears to have argued that there is a foreign intelligence exception to the Fourth Amendment.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Ethan Knight countered that the government has court-approved procedures in place that were followed with respect to Mohamud’s case. Warrants are not required under an exception for foreign intelligence, he argued.

“The reality is when you peel back the layers of hyperbole, what would be unprecedented is if this court were to grant the defendant’s motion,” Knight said.

He also pushed back against a wider examination of the program, saying that it was “not the time or place or even arguably the branch of government” for the broader debate.

Granted, this is not much more extreme than the argument the government made in its filings (as summarized by ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer), that Americans may have no privacy interest in international communications.

In  support of the law, the government contends that Americans who make phone calls or sends emails to people abroad have a diminished expectation of privacy because the people with whom they are communicating – non-Americans abroad, that is – are not protected by the Constitution.

The government also argues that Americans’ privacy rights are further diminished in this context because the NSA has a “paramount” interest in examining information that crosses international borders.

And, apparently contemplating a kind of race to the bottom in global privacy rights, the government even argues that Americans can’t reasonably expect that their international communications will be private from the NSA when the intelligence services of so many other countries – the government doesn’t name them – might be monitoring those communications, too.

The government’s argument is not simply that the NSA has broad authority to monitor Americans’ international communications. The US government is arguing that the NSA’s authority is unlimited in this respect. If the government is right, nothing in the Constitution bars the NSA from monitoring a phone call between a journalist in New York City and his source in London. For that matter, nothing bars the NSA from monitoring every call and email between Americans in the United States and their non-American friends, relatives, and colleagues overseas.

The legal record on this is specific. While FISC found there was a warrant exception for “foreign” communications in Yahoo’s challenge of the Protect America Act, the FISA Court of Review’s decision was more narrow, finding only that there was a special need for the information before it, and also finding there were adequate protections for Americans (protections the government has been abrogating since the start of these warrantless programs). So while I will have to check the record, it appears that the line attorneys are going beyond what the appellate record (such as the FISCR decision can be called an appellate record) holds.

Albright Drops Pretense of Neutrality, Goes All In With MEK Terrorists

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I have long criticized David Albright for his behavior in helping those who have tried to fan the flames over the years for a war with Iran. His role usually consists of providing technical “analysis” that somehow always works to support the latest allegations from sources (most often identified as diplomats) who selectively feed information to either AP reporter George Jahn or Reuters reporter Fredrik Dahl. As the P5+1 group of countries and Iran have moved closer and closer to achieving a final deal on Iran’s nuclear program, the Iran war hawks are growing more and more desperate. That desperation this week has resulted in David Albright dropping all pretense of being a neutral technical analyst and joining forces with the terrorist group MEK in slinging new, unsubstantiated allegations about Iran’s nuclear program.

On Tuesday, Albright published a strange document (pdf) on Iran’s nuclear program at his Institute for Science and International Security website. Also on Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial that included a quote from Albright.

The reason I say that Albright’s document at the ISIS website is strange is that the document is simply titled “Spin, Spin, Spin” and, after the author list (Andrea Stricker joins him in the byline), the document puts a very strange quotation right after the dateline:

“The bigger the lie…”

The “Spin, Spin, Spin” title could be excused as a clever pun if the article’s topic were the centrifuges that Iran uses for enrichment of uranium. Instead, the topic is exploding bridge wire detonators. The title is a complete dismissal of everything that Iran has to say about the detonators, ascribing it to spin rather than fact. But then Albright and Stricker move beyond the mere spin accusation all the way to accusing Iran of lying–before they lay out a single bit evidence to support their allegation.

The document opens by attacking press coverage of Iran beginning to discuss EBW’s with the IAEA:

Media reporting immediately following the release of the IAEA’s safeguards report focused on Iran’s willingness to discuss the exploding bridge wire (EBW) detonators. That is certainly good news, but did Iran resolve the IAEA’s concern? The answer has to be no or probably not. This fact was only lightly covered in the media over the weekend. Some misinterpreted Iran’s willingness to discuss the issue with making progress on it. One group at least even went so far as to declare that Iran had “halted nuclear activities in the areas of greatest proliferation concern and rolled back its program in other key areas.” But if Iran continues to work on aspects of nuclear weapons, as the IAEA worries, then it is necessary to reserve judgment on that question.

After a while, the document moves on to the accusation that Iran is lying:

So, while it is significant that Iran has been willing to talk about this issue for the first time since 2008 when it unilaterally ended cooperation over the matter, the key consideration is whether Iran is actually addressing the IAEA’s concerns. More plainly, is it telling the truth? The EBW issue must be taken in the context of the large amount of evidence collected by Western intelligence agencies and the IAEA over many years, detailed in the annex to the November 2011 safeguards report, indicating EBWs were part of a nuclear weapon design effort and military nuclear program. From that perspective, Iran has not answered this issue adequately and appears to have simply elevated the level of its effort to dissemble.

Ah, so Albright is basing the accusation of lying on the “evidence…detailed in the annex to the November 2011 safeguards report”. Okay then. Never mind that the annex, based almost exclusively on the “laptop of death” has been pretty thoroughly debunked and seems likely to be a product of forgery. About seven and a half years ago, some dirty hippie figured out that the most likely source of this forgery was the MEK. One can only wonder how Albright has gone from being enough of a scientist to seeing the holes in the forgery to even be quoted by Gareth Porter in a 2010 debunking of the data to now throwing his entire weight (while apparently deciding to throw away his entire reputation) behind the allegations.

The full extent of Albright’s loss of intellectual honesty becomes clear when we look at the Wall Street Journal editorial. At least the Journal is open about its latest round of accusations coming directly from the MEK: Read more →

DOD Reasserts Its Right to Force Feed While Not Denying Force Feeding Is Torture

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Last Thursday, as a number of outlets reported, Judge Gladys Kessler declined to renew her own Temporary Restraining Order prohibiting the government from force feeding Abu Wa’el Dhiab. As she wrote, Dhiab was willing to be force fed without withdrawing his feeding tube each session and without use of the restraining chair. But the government refused, and so, “faced with an anguishing Hobson’s choice,” in the face of the “intransigence of the Department of Defense,” Kessler did not renew her TRO and ordered DOD to, “abide by their own Standard Operating Protocols, and that the standard for enteral feeding is whether Mr. Dhiab is actually facing an ‘imminent risk of death or great bodily injury.'”

Only, it’s not clear that’s the standard. In fact, the government itself says the standard may be simply body weight of less than 85% of ideal body weight.

A slew of filings have been released in Dhiab’s case in the last month (see below). But key among them are some filings submitted in April and early May, which were just released Friday.

Effectively, the delayed release of these documents reveals that back on May 7, one of the government’s primary rebuttals to claims about the conditions under which Dhiab was force fed last year was not to refute those claims, but rather to claim he had no standing to complain because he was not — at that point — being force fed.  Only 6 days later Gitmo cleared Dhiab to be force fed.

Underlying this discussion is Dhiab’s claim that the government has made the standards for force feeding arbitrary so as to be able to subject those detainees leading force feeding campaigns to painful treatment to get them to stop.

To substantiate that argument, the memorandum unsealed on Friday lays out the changes made to Gitmo’s force feeding protocol in November and December. Those changes include:

  • Deletion of limits on the speed at which detainees could be force fed
  • Elimination of guidelines on responding to complaints about speed of force feeding
  • Change of weight monitoring from daily to weekly
  • Deletion of chair restraint guidelines (DOD made a special SOP to cover restraint chair they have thus far refused to turn over)
  • Expansion of scenarios in which prisoners can be force fed, including those at 85% of ideal body weight (IBW)
  • Deletion of provisions against on-off force feeding
  • Discontinuation of use of Reglan (this has to do with potentially permanent side effects from the drug)
  • Replacement of phrase “hunger strike” with phrase “medical management of detainees with weight loss”

In response, the government argued (at a time Dhiab was not eating but before they put him on the force feeding list) that he didn’t have standing because he had not been force fed for 2 months. It also made a sustained defense of the 85% of IBW.  Much of the rest of the response described how prisoners are currently force fed.

Dhiab’s lawyers responded by parsing the language of the government response closely. They point out that:

  • No one actually involved in the force feeding of detainees submitted a declaration in the case
  • The Senior Medical Officer whose declaration forms the basis of much of the response didn’t arrive in Gitmo until this February, and so has no first hand knowledge of last year’s force feeding
  • The guy who preceded him did not submit a declaration even though he remains in the Navy, stationed at Jacksonville NAS
  • The government relies on a 2006 DOD Standard Operating Procedure document rather than the specific Gitmo SOPs written last year

Ultimately, Dhiab argues that the government has stopped some of the most abusive practices associated with force feeding — which they compare (with a doctor’s declaration in support) to water torture — while being sued.

Respondents state that the force-feeding “is” conducted humanely, and that detainees “are” not being force-fed at quatnties and speeds amounting to water torture. That might be partially true today, to the extent respondents have suspended some (but not all) of their abusive practices during the pendency of litigation challenging those practices. But Respondents utterly fail to rebut Petitioner’s showing of past abusive practices.

And of course, they’re making this argument as the government claims they shouldn’t have to turn over videos or Dhiab’s medical records from last year, the latter because they couldn’t be relevant to this suit because they couldn’t affect what might happen to Dhiab going forward — in spite of the fact that the SOPs remain unchanged.

This is all cross-allegation at this point; we may find out more when the government has to start turning over this stuff in June.

But it seems remarkable, the way the government has hidden details from last year, even while controlling Dhiab’s force feeding status and with it their legal argument.

April 18, 2014: Motion for preliminary injunction, with sealed supplemental memorandum

April 22, 2014: Dhiab speaks to lawyers

April 23, 2014: Dhiab resumes skipping meals

April 24, 2014 Status report

May 7, 2014: Sealed opposition to preliminary injunction

May 12, 2014: Sealed reply to opposition; government refuses to provide 2013 medical records, videos, restraint chair SOP

May 13, 2014: Emergency motion to preserve evidence; Dhiab placed back on force feeding list; nurses start cajoling him about eating

May 14, 2014: Order to reply to emergency motion; according to his lawyer, Jon Eisenberg, Dhiab force fed (all other force feeding details come from Eisenberg)

May 15, 2014: Opposition to emergency motion; according to filing, Dhiab had not yet been force fed; Dhiab force fed in afternoon

May 16, 2014: Reply to opposition to emergency motion; Kessler issues TRO; Dhiab claims Sergeant harasses him about a FCE

May 21, 2014: Status report hearing

May 22, 2014: Kessler does not reissue TRO

May 23, Kessler orders partial disclosure; documents unsealed; Dhiab force fed

May 24: Dhiab force fed twice

May 25: Dhiab force fed twice

May 26: Dhiab voluntarily takes food and nutrient

No Protection for International Communications: Russ Feingold Told Us So

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Both the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer and EFF have reviews of the government’s latest claims about Section 702. In response to challenges by two defendants, Mohamed Osman Mohamud and Jamshid Muhtorov, to the use of 702-collected information, the government claims our international communications have no Fourth Amendment protection.

Here’s how Jaffer summarizes it:

It’s hardly surprising that the government believes the 2008 law is constitutional – government officials advocated for its passage six years ago, and they have been vigorously defending the law ever since. Documents made public over the last eleven-and-a-half months by the Guardian and others show that the NSA has been using the law aggressively.

What’s surprising – even remarkable – is what the government says on the way to its conclusion. It says, in essence, that the Constitution is utterly indifferent to the NSA’s large-scale surveillance of Americans’ international telephone calls and emails:

The privacy rights of US persons in international communications are significantly diminished, if not completely eliminated, when those communications have been transmitted to or obtained from non-US persons located outside the United States.

That phrase – “if not completely eliminated” – is unusually revealing. Think of it as the Justice Department’s twin to the NSA’s “collect it all”.

[snip]

In support of the law, the government contends that Americans who make phone calls or sends emails to people abroad have a diminished expectation of privacy because the people with whom they are communicating – non-Americans abroad, that is – are not protected by the Constitution.

The government also argues that Americans’ privacy rights are further diminished in this context because the NSA has a “paramount” interest in examining information that crosses international borders.

And, apparently contemplating a kind of race to the bottom in global privacy rights, the government even argues that Americans can’t reasonably expect that their international communications will be private from the NSA when the intelligence services of so many other countries – the government doesn’t name them – might be monitoring those communications, too.

The government’s argument is not simply that the NSA has broad authority to monitor Americans’ international communications. The US government is arguing that the NSA’s authority is unlimited in this respect. If the government is right, nothing in the Constitution bars the NSA from monitoring a phone call between a journalist in New York City and his source in London. For that matter, nothing bars the NSA from monitoring every call and email between Americans in the United States and their non-American friends, relatives, and colleagues overseas.

I tracked Feingold’s warnings about Section 702 closely in 2008. That’s where I first figured out the risk of what we now call back door searches, for example. But I thought his comment here was a bit alarmist.

As I’ve learned to never doubt Ron Wyden’s claims about surveillance, I long ago learned never to doubt Feingold’s.

 

Big NSA Funding Recipient, Ethiopia, Spies on Journalists in US

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Screen Shot 2014-05-13 at 12.56.26 PMAlong with the release of his book today, Glenn Greenwald has released a stash of documents, many of them new. One of them PDF 39) shows how much funding NSA gives some of its international partners.

The amounts involved aren’t huge — even Pakistan, the leading recipient, gets just $2.5 million, and most recipients get far less.

But Ethiopia is third on the list, receiving somewhere around $450,000. Not a ton, but not chicken scratch, either. Presumably, much of that targets Somalia.

Still, I think it significant, given that Ethiopia is getting sued in the US for spying on journalists based in the US.

A Washington area man with ties to Ethiopia’s political opposition sued that country’s government in federal court Tuesday, alleging that agents had used powerful spyware to hack into his computer and snoop on his private communications for more than four months.

The suit says that forensics experts found more than 2,000 files related to a spyware program called FinSpy, including evidence that it had accessed the plaintiff’s Skype calls, e-mails and Web-browsing history in violation of U.S. wiretapping laws.

The case is the latest sign that the government of Ethi­o­pia, an American ally with a history of repressing political opponents, journalists and human rights activists, has used sophisticated Internet technology to monitor its perceived enemies, even when they are in other countries.

“The Ethio­pian government appears to be doing everything it can to spy on members of the diaspora, especially those in contact with opposition groups,” said Nate Cardozo, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group based in San Francisco that prepared the suit.

I imagine working closely with the NSA teaches you a lot about how better to target its dissidents overseas.

Notice Of Tinkering Going On

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screenshotHello one and all. This is just a very brief advisory that we are going to be doing some updating to Emptywheel blog today. It should start in the next 30 minutes to hour from the time of this post. The site may be down briefly. Frankly we think we have it slicked out pretty well, but you never know when things hop off the drawing board and into practice.

Even if things go smoothly, as hoped, I am sure there will be some refining and testing to do throughout the day. In that regard, please bear with us and help us by giving us feedback. As always, we are doing the update to give you a better overall experience, so your input is valuable.

Thank you for your patience and assistance. Exciting times!

Also: McCaffrey is our engineer. May be more trouble than originally anticipated.

Verizon VP: Company-Based Transparency Reports Don’t Help Consumers

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There was a fascinating panel of Telecom execs and bloggers discussing human rights at RightsCon yesterday. Among others, Verizon Executive Vice President and General Counsel Randal Milch spoke.

As I noted in passing, Verizon published an update to their Transparency Report the other day. Particularly as compared to AT&T’s bogus report, the Verizon report was laudable for its explanation of what it couldn’t show, such as when it acknowledged that its report did not include the hundreds of millions of customers whose records got turned over under Section 215.

We note that while we now are able to provide more information about national security orders that directly relate to our customers, reporting on other matters, such as any orders we may have received related to the bulk collection of non-content information, remains prohibited.

It also acknowledged something obvious but that which should be explicit: when the government obtains content from Verizon, it sometimes gets metadata as well.

Some FISA orders that seek content also seek non-content; we counted those as FISA orders for content and to avoid double counting have not also counted them as FISA orders for non-content.

All this is useful information that lends the report itself credibility.

So when I first approached Milch, I thanked him for the quality of his report.

Which is why I was so surprised when he said the government should be in the business of transparency reports, not the providers. I challenged that, noting that an easy comparison of AT&T and Verizon’s reports strongly suggests that Verizon demands more legal process for requests than AT&T. He dismissed that, suggesting any differences arise from the different kind of client base the providers have.

Granted, Milch was talking about your average consumer, not … me.

But it seemed bizarre. Or perhaps it was a testament that Milch and Verizon generally don’t want to have to compete in this front.

Milch answered one other question of mine: I asked whether the Verizon/Vodaphone split affected Verizon’s obligations to the UK (that is, to GCHQ). He claims it didn’t affect it at all, that it was more an investment stake and that none of Verizon’s cell call records were in the UK. (No, I didn’t point out that the records are right where GCHQ wants them, in places accessible under Tempora).

So at least according to Milch’s claims, my theory laid out here is wrong.