Wiretapping at Its Worst

[babylonsister]

Wiretapping at Its Worst

By Brian Beutler, Media Consortium. Posted October 24, 2007.

A revolving door between the telecommunications industry and federal government ensures that the doors to your personal privacy are wide open.

It seemed like shocking news last week when the telecommunications giant Verizon admitted it has readily allowed warrantless national security investigators to browse customer records on thousands of occasions. But given the revolving door between the telecom industry and federal government, no one should be surprised by their cozy relationship.

According to OpenSecrets.org, a website run by the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, D.C., the worlds are well-connected: There is no shortage of government officials who once worked in the telecommunications industry, and no shortage of telecommunications industry execs who once worked for the government.

Many of the men and women who have hopped the fence -- sometimes more than once -- between government and telecom have done so via predictable channels. It's not uncommon, for instance, for aides and commissioners to the Federal Communications Commission to come from or move on to careers in telecommunications. It's arguably not even that surprising. But there are also the executives -- like those who fill Verizon's ranks -- who have spent years fighting for the government's right to pry into consumer data.

In an Oct. 12 letter to Democratic lawmakers, Randal S. Milch, senior vice president and general counsel to Verizon, admitted that, in tens of thousands of instances over the last two years, his company has provided government officials with subscriber information without court orders. According to the letter, that information has included subscriber names and addresses, local and long-distance telephone connection records, and methods and sources of payment.

Milch serves alongside William P. Barr, who is executive vice president and general counsel to Verizon. In Barr's past life, he was an analyst for the CIA who went on to serve as a domestic policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan and as the attorney general of the United States under President George H.W. Bush. Throughout his esteemed government career, and well after he'd moved into the telecommunications industry, Barr has shown a voracious appetite for government surveillance.

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