USA Today has been duped. They are now retracting their claims after retracing their steps. Apparently, they cannot come up with any evidence of a contractual agreement between the accused telcos and the NSA.
Based on its reporting after the May 11 article, USA TODAY has now concluded that while the NSA has built a massive domestic calls record database involving the domestic call records of telecommunications companies, the newspaper cannot confirm that BellSouth or Verizon contracted with the NSA to provide bulk calling records to that database.
Now if I was a spymaster at the NSA and it was my job to give the agency plausible deniability, this would be a happy day for me. And you can be sure that if Arthur Andersen can shred records for Enron, the spymasters who may have arranged to suck the data out of the telcos are an order of magnitude more stealthy.
What I've learned from reading Kolb is that there are pros in the world of stealth that know how to make money rather untraceable. And it seems to me that one of the first things one would do in order to make such trails hard to find is to use proprietaries and cutouts. A proprietary is a company that does the business for an agency like a subcontractor. A cutout is a person that does a job but doesn't necessarily know who he is doing it for. Then of course there are just theives for hire or blackmail. Somebody who does a bit of dirty work and then is gone.
So here's how you do it. Maybe. You set up a company, say in Italy. It's a telecom and you buy the super sniffing hardware and software. You get your engineers to customize the software. You fold the company and disperse the assets to a cutout. The cutout's well-insured building burns down and the insurance claim says 'electonic equipment'. Now the asset is effectively destroyed. Only it didn't. It just disappeared and what burned in the fire was an ordinary PBX.
Next you find out interesting places where contractors and subcontractors have access to ports of entry into telecom and one day one of the normal contractors is out sick and your replacement dude puts in the wires. 'Out sick' means maybe he accidently got a flat tire and the 'dispatcher' said don't worry we'll send another guy.
Now you've got the super hardware in place, you've got the deniability on the actual asset sold by the legitimate sniffer company. Now you paper up your front-end. Which is to say, you make official overtures to try and accomplish through above board channels what you've already secretively done. This insulates both parties whether or not such overtures are accepted. If they are, all the better, you have a second source with which to validate your secret source.
I would be ashamed and embarrassed if our intelligence organizations weren't clever enough to jack USA Today and the NYT. So let the NYT have its moment of treacherous glory. Remember, the more incompetent the CIA appears, the more dangerous it actually becomes.
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