So it seems that the Bush Administration apparently started spying on Americans without warrants before 9/11:
Mr. Nacchio said last year that he had refused an N.S.A. request for customers’ call records in late 2001, after the Sept. 11 attacks, as the agency initiated domestic surveillance and data mining programs to monitor Al Qaeda communications.
But the documents unsealed Wednesday in federal court in Denver, first reported in The Rocky Mountain News on Thursday, claim for the first time that pressure on the company to participate in activities it saw as improper came as early as February, nearly seven months before the terrorist attacks.
The significance of the claim is hard to assess, because the court documents are heavily redacted and N.S.A. officials will not comment on the agency’s secret surveillance programs. Other government officials have said that the agency’s eavesdropping without warrants began only after Sept. 11, 2001, under an order from President Bush.
But the court filings in Mr. Nacchio’s case illustrate what is well known inside the telecommunications industry but little appreciated by the public: that the N.S.A. has for some time worked closely with phone companies, whose networks carry the telephone and Internet traffic the agency seeks out for intercept.
If this is true, and it does fit their history, there are a couple of points here aside form the Bush Administration’s strange and overwhelming desire to be remember as less competent imitators of Pinochet. All but one company went along with this power grab and 9/11 happened anyway. Obviously, the spying program did little good to protect the country. Which is expected. If you have read the 9/11 Commission report, the problem was almost never a lack of intelligence. The problem was that intelligence was not shared, out of professional jealousy and incompetence primarily, and we did not have enough trained analysts to review the intelligence we did have in time to prevent the attacks. So the next time someone on the right whines about how having to obey the Constitution means hat we are all going to die! die! die!, remind them that the Bush Administration has been ignoring the Constitution since before 9/11 and it did us no damn good.
The second important point in this story is that the telecom companies all bowed before the government, at least in part, because they were afraid of losing large contracts. Their economic well being demanded that they comply with spying on their customers and so they did. There may have well been other reasons for their capitulation, but it needs to be noted that when the government failed to provide strong oversight of their behavior, they ran for the quick buck, regardless of the effect of their actions on their customers, their fellow citizens, and their country. From the standpoint of business, it makes perfect sense. Which, absent strong government oversight, is why it will happen again and again.
Without a strong reason not to, telecom companies will almost always put their economic interests ahead of any other considerations; it is what corporations are designed to do. Markets cannot keep you free, because markets care only about profit and loss. The pressure to produce profit and avoid loss eventually means that, in an unfettered marketplace, the scrupulous will almost certainly be driven out of the market by the unscrupulous. When government oversight breaks down, as it did spectacularly in this case, the free market will chain you as fast as any government. They might, if they are very clever, even get you to pay for the chains yourself.
