Whistleblower links wireless carrier to warrantless wiretaps

A new whistleblower has surfaced with allegations that a major wireless carrier may have given the U.S. government wholesale access to subscribers’ calls and other proprietary information.
The claims, which are strikingly similar to those in a 2006 suit filed against Verizon Wireless and others, arise at a critical moment in a high-profile fight between the White House and Congress over whether telecom companies should be given retroactive immunity for participation in the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program begun after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Babak Pasdar, a computer security consultant who heads Bat Blue Corp., made the allegations in an affidavit given to the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit whistleblower advocacy group. Pasdar said he was brought in to work on a project for an unnamed large wireless company, and became concerned about the legality of the “Quantico Circuit,” a high-speed line from the wireless carrier to an unnamed third party. Quantico, Va., is the site of a U.S. intelligence and military base.
“The circuit was tied to the organization’s core network,” Pasdar stated in the affidavit. “It had access to the billing system, text messaging, fraud detection, Web site, and pretty much all the systems in the data center without restrictions.”
Verizon Wireless declined to comment.
Top House Commerce Committee members, who have been trying with little success to learn more about telecom companies’ involvement in the National Security Agency’s post-9/11 eavesdropping initiative, including whether privacy laws may have been broken, have brought the new revelations to the attention of colleagues as they consider whether to follow the Senate’s lead in granting retroactive immunity to carriers. The lawmakers said the allegations are not new, but they’ve been routinely thwarted in attempts to verify and investigate them by the Bush administration.
The White House insists there are national security grounds for not revealing details about the warrantless wiretapping effort.
“Because legislators should not vote before they have sufficient facts, we continue to insist that all House members be given access to the necessary information, including the relevant documents underlying this matter, to make an informed decision on their vote,” stated a letter to lawmakers signed by House Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.), telecom subcommittee Chairman Edward Markey (D-Mass.), and oversight and investigations subcommittee Chairman Bart Stupak (D-Mich.). “After reviewing the documentation and these latest allegations, members should be given adequate time to properly evaluate the separate question of retroactive immunity.”
House Commerce Committee leaders said Pasdar’s allegations echo those previously made by Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit against AT&T Inc. More than three dozen lawsuits have been filed against top telecom firms, including parent companies of national mobile-phone operators AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless.
“When you put Mr. Pasdar’s information together with that of AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein, there is troubling evidence of telecom misconduct in massive domestic surveillance of ordinary Americans,” said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Congress needs to have hearings and get some answers about whether American telecommunications companies are helping the government to illegally spy on millions of us. Retroactive immunity for telecom companies now ought to be off the table in the ongoing FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] debate.”