How the telephone company listens in on your calls and what they tell the government.
http://www.alternet.org/rights/33334/Snip
For US intelligence officials looking for allies in the industry, AT&T, MCI and Sprint have a lot to offer. In 2002, when the spying program began, AT&T's CEO was C. Michael Armstrong, the former CEO of Hughes Electronic Corp. At the time, Armstrong was also chairman of the Business Roundtable's Security Task Force, where he was instrumental in creating CEO COM LINK, a secure telecommunications system that allows the chief executives of major US corporations to speak directly to senior members of Bush's Cabinet during national emergencies. Randall Stephenson, a former SBC Communications executive who is now AT&T's chief operating officer, is a member of the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, a group of executives from the communications and defense industries who advise the President on security issues related to telecom.
Those executives, all of whom hold security clearances, meet at the White House once a year--Vice President Cheney was the speaker at their last meeting--and hold quarterly conference calls with high-ranking officials. (Asked if the NSA surveillance was ever discussed at these sessions, committee spokesman Stephen Barrett said, "We do not participate in intelligence gathering.") AT&T also makes no bones about its national security work. When SBC was preparing to acquire the company last year, the two companies underscored their ties with US intelligence in joint comments to the FCC. "AT&T's support of the intelligence and defense communities includes the performance of various classified contracts," the companies said, pointing out that AT&T "maintains special secure facilities for the performance of classified work and the safeguarding of classified information."
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MCI, too, is a major government contractor and was highly valued by Verizon in part because of its work in defense and intelligence. Nicholas Katzenbach, the former US Attorney General who was appointed chairman of MCI's board after the spectacular collapse of its previous owner, WorldCom, reiterated MCI's intelligence connections in a 2003 statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee. "We are especially proud," he wrote, "of our role in supporting our national-security agencies' infrastructure, and we are gratified by the many positive comments about our service from officials at the US Department of Defense and other national-security agencies." MCI's general counsel--who would presumably have a say in any decision to cooperate with the NSA--is William Barr. He is a former assistant general counsel at the Central Intelligence Agency and served as Attorney General during the Administration of President George H.W. Bush.
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