There is
something disquieting and unwholesome about telecoms feeding our
communications to government agencies. It was headline news, again,
last month when we learned that AT&T has had a longstanding
partnership with the National Security Agency. Unfortunately, this
form of private-public intelligence collusion is neither new nor, in
my view, illegal. Whether it is immoral is an entirely separate
question.
U.S.
communications carriers first became partners in the intelligence
game shortly after World War I. Diplomatic and military affairs
transmitted via telegram to home countries were intercepted and
decrypted by the Black Chamber, the NSA’s precursor. Obtaining
telegrams then was eerily similar to how communications are obtained
today: The government simply asked.
The Western
Union Telegraph Company and the Postal Telegraph Company allowed
intelligence officers to copy telegrams, and this partnership
persisted in peacetime. In 1929, however, Secretary of State Henry
Stimson defunded the Black Chamber. His concise, and seemingly naïve,
rationale reportedly being: “Gentlemen do not read each other’s
mail.”
World War II
exigencies overruled Stimson’s moral objections and the United
States resumed telegram interception. Starting in 1945, just after
the end of the war, this interception widened, and Western Union,
RCA, and ITT provided the government, via the NSA and its
predecessors the Army Security Agency and the Armed Forces Security
Agency, with paper tape, microfilm, and later magnetic tape copies of
most international telegrams. This continued unabated for decades
after the war and was known as Project SHAMROCK.
NSA shared
this data with law enforcement, including the FBI and Secret Service.
Project SHAMROCK, however, suffered from classic function creep, the
gradual extension of a system beyond the purposes for which it was
conceived. In the 1960s and 1970s, names of American citizens and
organizations were added to watch lists. Anti-war activists, Martin
Luther King Jr., Muhummad Ali, and Jane Fonda were among the nearly
1,700 U.S. individuals and organizations targeted for domestic
surveillance. This was known as Project MINARET.
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