Times Reports “Confusion about law” forces mistrial in Boeing v. Eastman

This is pretty pathetic considering the large part the Seattle Times had in all of this!  GFS

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“Confusion about law” forces mistrial in Boeing worker case

By Mike Carter

Seattle Times staff reporter

A judge declared a mistrial in the case of an ex-Boeing worker accused of improperly accessing sensitive computer files at work after a King County Superior Court jury failed to reach a verdict Monday after nearly five days of deliberations.

The jury had deadlocked in the computer-trespass prosecution of Gerald Eastman, and jurors were sent home just before noon “because there was confusion about the law and how it applied to the facts of this case,” said Senior Deputy Prosecutor Scott Peterson.

Eastman was charged with 16 counts of computer trespass, a charge normally reserved for hackers who force their way into somebody else’s personal computer. In this case, however, Eastman was accused of taking files and other information from an employee-accessible system and leaking it to The Seattle Times. Eastman also gave information to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, according to evidence presented at trial.

Eastman, who worked at Boeing for 18 years — much of it as a quality-control inspector — argued that he had access to those files.

Testimony at his trial indicated that he spent hours every day surfing internal company Web sites, and investigators allege he downloaded more than 8,000 files that police later found saved on his home computer.

Boeing and prosecutors claimed that 16 stories in The Seattle Times contained information from downloaded documents.

On his personal blog, The Last Inspector, the 46-year-old Eastman wrote that one of the jurors came up to him afterward and “shook my hand and said, ‘you’re my hero.’

“He … and the other juror(s) who saw that I did not break the law in the case are my heroes, obviously,” Eastman wrote.

Peterson and Eastman’s attorney, Ramona Brandes, said the jury was irrevocably split, 10-2, for conviction.

Brandes said the jury was faced with a “vague statute” that does not specifically say it is a crime for an employee to access information that an employer doesn’t want him to have. Given the facts of the case, she said, the jury’s failure to reach a verdict was not surprising and showed that the panel had paid close attention during the trial.

“I am very pleased,” she said.

Peterson said he will meet with King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg “in the next few weeks” to determine whether the case can be retried. He said the jury had sent out several questions in the past few days relating to their “confusion.”

Satterberg will meet with Boeing officials, as well, Peterson said.

“We have to decide whether this is a weakness in the evidence that just can’t be overcome, or whether we would be successful with another group of 12 people,” Peterson said.

Boeing spokesman Peter Conte said the company will welcome a meeting with Satterberg, “but you should know that any decision will be made by the prosecutor.”

Eastman was arrested at work in May 2006, briefly held in the King County Jail and fired about that time.

Boeing began an investigation into news leaks and Eastman was identified in 2006 as an employee who had downloaded thousands of pages of documents, some of which contained information that wound up in news stories. Eastman later acknowledged that he had leaked information to The Times.

About that time, Boeing received an e-mail titled “Leaks to The Seattle Times” that identified Eastman as the leaker.

The company began an investigation into Eastman and soon after contacted Seattle police.

As part of efforts to obtain a search warrant, a Boeing official estimated the company stood to lose $5 billion to $15 billion if even a portion of the documents allegedly copied by Eastman were “released to the wrong hands,” according to a written declaration provided to police investigators.

There was no evidence at trial that any information of that sensitivity was ever leaked.

Eastman, who was fired for violating company policy, has said he was trying to address serious quality-control issues at the airplane manufacturer.

Mike Carter: 206-464-3706 or mcarter@seattletimes.com

Bush’s OSHA: No Laws? No Crimes

Bush’s OSHA: No Laws? No Crimes
    By Elizabeth de la Vega
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    Tuesday 08 April 2008

    Ninety-seven years ago this month, just eight days after the March 25, 1911, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire , in which nearly 150 young men and women suffered horrific deaths, Rose Schneiderman rocked the Metropolitan Opera House.

    She was not singing. But her voice, pellucid and sharp, carried the house:

“I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting.”

    Who was Rose Schneiderman? She was, in the words of Frances Perkins (who later became Franklin D. Roosevelt’s labor secretary): “an unknown little girl.” It was a realistic – not unkind – description of this factory worker, who earned a paltry $5.00 a week for grueling ten-hour days spent sewing linings into golf hats. To the indifferent eyes shaded by those natty caps, the Polish immigrant with a sixth-grade education was almost certainly invisible, or, at best, a curiosity to be observed on a Sunday afternoon East Side-slumming tour.

    On Sunday, April 2, however, all eyes were riveted upon the 29-year-old labor organizer with “fiery red hair” who was commanding the Opera House stage.

    The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory building, it had been said, was fireproof. And so it was: The structure survived unscathed. The people inside, however, did not. The owners had cut costs by packing seamstresses and chain-smoking fabric cutters into a cramped wood space, eschewing rudimentary procedures necessary to avoid the accumulation of flammable oily rags and littered fabric. Even worse, to avoid the theft of an odd scrap of lace or ribbon, they had locked all but one door to streamline the bosses’ daily inspection of pockets and handbags on the employees’ way out. So, when the inevitable conflagration began, the mostly teenaged workers – for some of whom the only identifiable remains were their engagement rings (14 in all) – had no way out. They were left to roast to death or hurtle themselves to the pavement.

    Suddenly humanitarians after this tragedy, the same Gilded-Age revelers who had caroused through the East Side as if it were Disneyland were moved to donate to Red Cross victims’ funds.

    Schneiderman was having none of it. It was much too late to offer “a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers, brothers and sisters by way of a charity gift.” It was also, she reminded them:

“[n]ot the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred.”

    Certainly, much has improved for factory workers since 1911. But, as workers at the Imperial Sugar Co. in Port Wentworth, Georgia, could attest, life is still cheap and property is still sacred. On February 8, 2008, 12 employees there were burned to death and dozens more critically injured because Republicans are committed to making sure no pesky regulations upset that perverse calculation – regardless of the human suffering it entails.

    In the early 1900s, as a former New York City fire chief testified regarding factory conditions after the Triangle fire, there was “nobody responsible for anything.” Now, of course, we have an office – the Occupational Safety and Health Agency (OSHA) – that is at least putatively responsible for workplace safety. Specifically, OSHA is legislatively mandated to (1) enact industrial standards for toxic substance exposure and site protection; and (2) conduct inspections to ensure those standards are followed.

    Unfortunately, OSHA started becoming anemic during the 1990s, and now it is positively spectral. With fewer employees than it had 30 years ago, yet twice the number of workplaces in its charge, OSHA would need 133 years to inspect every business over which it has jurisdiction.

    The far more serious problem with OSHA’s performance, however, is that, under the Bush administration, it has deliberately avoided setting any significant industrial standards. (To be precise, it has set one, regarding the permissible level of workplace exposure to the known carcinogen hexavalent chromium, but only after a court ordered it to do so.)

    OSHA’s abdication of its duties is not a matter of incompetence. It is, as Rep. John Barrows (D-Georgia) pointed out in a March 12, 2008, Workforce Protections Subcommittee Hearing of the House, Education and Labor Committee, a purposeful unwillingness to act. Or, to put it more colorfully, as Barrows did:

“When you’ve got an agency that don’t know its job or don’t care about its job, or has all kinds of reasons for not doin’ its job, it’s a little bit like goin’ bird huntin’ and havin’ to tote the dog.”

    OSHA’s failure to enact mandatory standards has not only been fatal to its mission; it has been fatal to the workers.

    The Imperial Sugar refinery disaster, for example, followed a long-known pattern of explosions involving finely powdered and, therefore, highly combustible materials, such as chemicals, flour, metals and, of course, sugar. As William Wright, interim executive of the US Chemical Safety Board (CSB), explained at the March 12 Workforce Protections Subcommittee hearing, witnesses familiar with the Port Wentworth facility described seeing snow-like piles of accumulated sugar dust on floor joists, pipes and equipment. When this highly combustible powder was dislodged by an as-yet-unknown event, it fueled the massive explosion and fire.

    Like so many factory fires before it, the Imperial Sugar Co. catastrophe was both predictable and preventable. In 2006, the CSB, after identifying 281 combustible dust fires responsible for 119 deaths and numerous injuries, formally urged OSHA to immediately establish mandatory combustible dust hazard regulations.

    This report was not a news flash to OSHA. The year before, OSHA itself had issued a bulletin entitled “Combustible Dust in Industry: Preventing and Mitigating the Effects of Fire and Explosions,” which had detailed a gruesome history of catastrophic explosions resulting from combustible dust and suggested procedures for prevention of future similar disasters. OSHA emphasized, however, the procedures were not mandatory. Failure to follow them would not be a basis for any adverse action whatsoever:

“This Safety and Health Information Bulletin is not a standard or regulation, and it creates no new legal obligations. The Bulletin is advisory in nature, informational in content, and is intended to assist employers in providing a safe and healthful workplace.”

    After the CSB issued its report in 2006, did OSHA decide to put some teeth into its recommendations? No. It established a National Emphasis Program to further encourage voluntary employer action.

    What about now, after yet another disaster caused by combustible dust? Well, according to Director Edwin Foulkes, OSHA is “saddened by the tragic loss of life that resulted from the Imperial Sugar explosion [and] will not rest until we ensure that all employees go home safely to their families and friends at the end of every work day.” So concerned is Foulkes that he has, on behalf of OSHA, sent out a very large number of letters – 300,000 to be exact – reminding employers about dust hazards.

    Foulkes has also promised to investigate the issue of mandatory combustible dust standards, but we should not expect those any time soon. Why? Because, as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory owners discovered when they were acquitted of manslaughter charges after the fire, the best way to avoid criminal liability for even the most egregious workplace malfeasance is not to have any laws at all. Despite infuriating testimony about previous warnings and blocked egress, the jury was unable to find owners Isaac Harris and Max Blenck had violated or failed to comply with any legal requirements: There weren’t any.

    It was a perfect void of government responsibility. And it is into this very same early-twentieth-century abyss the Bush administration has been dragging us for the past seven years. No regulations, ergo, no violations. No violations, ergo, no criminal culpability. Employers – unfettered by oversight or even laws – can live free and profit. Employees, on the other hand, can live free and die. Meanwhile, however, charitable donations continue to pour in for the families of the Imperial Sugar Co. victims who have been killed or maimed as the result of this unconscionable bargain.

    A century has passed since Rose Schneiderman rebuked the citizens at the Metropolitan Opera House in the wake of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, but were she alive today, I have no doubt that we would again be found wanting.

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    Elizabeth de la Vega is a former federal prosecutor with more than 20 years of experience. During her tenure, she was a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and chief of the San Jose Branch of the US attorney’s office for the Northern District of California. Her pieces have appeared in a variety of print and online publications including Truthout, TomDispatch.com, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times, Salon, Mother Jones and The Christian Science Monitor. The author of “United States v. George W. Bush et al,” she may be contacted at ElizabethdelaVega@Verizon.net or through Speakers Clearinghouse.

Architect of Assault on The Constitution?

John Yoo’s Tortured Explanations
    By Michael Winship
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    Tuesday 08 April 2008

    ”John Adams,” that entertaining and instructive TV mini-series based on David McCullough’s biography, is a reminder that, in some respects, nations are created as much from rancor and ego as they are from hope and goodwill.

    In the television version of the irascible Mr. Adams’s saga, democracy triumphs. Still, while watching it, I can’t help but be a little depressed by the thought that while the Founding Fathers sought to build a government of laws rather than men and were crafting such worthy documents as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the current administration’s legacy to history will be a series of documents that chose to subvert the very Constitution that Adams, Jefferson, and the others battled so hard to create.

    These documents reveal themselves slowly and reluctantly, as if to acknowledge that those who wrote them know deep in their souls what they have done is wrong and antithetical to the ways of a republic.

    The latest to ooze its way to the surface, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act suit by the ACLU, is the March 14, 2003, memo written by John Yoo, former deputy in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), an acolyte of David Addington, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff and former Cheney legal counsel.

    Contrary to claims the abuses at Abu Ghraib and other prisons were contrived by subordinates on the ground – i.e., “hicks with sticks” – Yoo’s 81-page memo rationalizes motive and establishes the bar for virtually every human rights violation that has taken place in the name of fighting the global war on terrorism.

    It is, in the words of Dan Froomkin, author of The Washington Post’s irreplaceable “White House Briefing” blog, “a historic document … the ultimate expression of Cheney’s belief that anything the president or his designates do – no matter how illegal, barbaric or un-American – is justifiable in the name of national self-defense.

    ”It is also an example of how enabling zealots to disregard the rule of law and the customary boundaries of human conduct leads to madness.”

    Froomkin’s description of the memo was echoed by The Post’s Dan Eggen and Josh White, who added, “Nine months after it was issued, Justice Department officials told the Defense Department to stop relying on it. But its reasoning provided the legal foundation for the Defense Department’s use of aggressive interrogation practices at a crucial time, as captives poured into military jails from Afghanistan and US forces prepared to invade Iraq.

    ”… The memo provides an expansive argument for nearly unfettered presidential power in a time of war. It contends that numerous laws and treaties forbidding torture or cruel treatment should not apply to US interrogations in foreign lands because of the president’s inherent wartime powers.”

    It was this memo, among others, that was shown to Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had been in charge of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, when he was reassigned to “GITMO-ize” detention operations in Iraq (“GITMO-ize” being the word he used to Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, then commander of military prisons in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib).

    Perhaps not insignificantly, as noted by Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman, formerly with the OLC, “The vast majority of the criminal abuse in Iraq occurs between Miller’s arrival and December 2003 (In December 2003, new OLC head Jack Goldsmith informed the Pentagon that it should no longer rely on John Yoo’s legal analysis.).”

    As if this weren’t enough, a footnote in the March 2003 memo reveals a second John Yoo masterpiece that blithely undermines the Constitution, in this case, the Fourth Amendment right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures.

    Written on October 23, 2001, not even a month and a half after 9/11, this still-classified Justice Department memo, titled, “Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States,” held that the Fourth Amendment had no bearing on domestic military operations.

    Although now disavowed by the White House, according to The Associated Press (AP), “For at least 16 months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001, the Bush administration believed that the Constitution’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures on US soil didn’t apply to its efforts to protect against terrorism.”

    AP quoted Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU’s National Security project: “The administration’s lawyers believe the president should be permitted to violate statutory law, to violate international treaties and even to violate the Fourth Amendment inside the US They believe that the president should be above the law.”

    In 1977, most of us laughed in astonishment after a disgraced Richard Nixon said to David Frost, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Turns out that belief is standard operating procedure in the White House of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their enablers, such as David Addington and Yoo, who now teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

    According to several sources, one of the “inspirations” for the techniques used against real-life detainees has been the Fox TV series, “24.” In my own mental TiVo, the great John Adams is to John Yoo what the intelligent “John Adams” TV series is to a different program on Fox, that sordid reality game show, “The Moment of Truth,” in which contestants are hooked up to lie detectors and interrogated about infidelities and other vices.

    But on the game show, only the viewers are tortured.

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    Michael Winship, president of the Writers Guild of America, East, and former writer with Bill Moyers, writes this weekly column for the Messenger Post Newspapers in upstate New York. This article was previously published in the Messenger Post Newspapers.

New Pressure on Justice to Release Documents to House Investigators

Given enough time and dissembling, this is what most WBRs and others trying to stand up to wrong doing will be up against.  They delay to their advantage.    GFS 

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At Justice, New Pressure to Release Documents
    By Carrie Johnson
    The Washington Post

    Tuesday 08 April 2008

    At his confirmation hearing last October, attorney general nominee Michael B. Mukasey assured senators that “there isn’t going to be any stonewalling” over congressional requests on his watch.

    Key lawmakers are now calling on the Justice Department to live up to that promise.

    The release last week of a Justice Department memo that authorized the military to pursue harsh interrogation techniques has ignited new demands for documents that underpin the Bush administration’s most sensitive policies, including the treatment of detainees and the warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens.

    Despite repeated congressional requests, some made as long as three years ago, key legal opinions and other department documents remain under wraps. That has prompted Democrats to accuse the Bush administration of trying to run out the clock.

    Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who chairs the Judiciary Committee, said the department has been somewhat more responsive under Mukasey than under his predecessor, Alberto R. Gonzales. But, Leahy said, “what slight improvement there has been does not overcome the department’s continued failure to provide . . . the secret justifications of presidential lawlessness that we have sought for years.”

    Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr said that officials spend “an enormous amount of department time and resources” responding to congressional inquiries, and that they have replied to more than 500 questions from lawmakers this year. “We agree that there is always room for improvement in our effort to be responsive to Congress,” Carr said.

    At the same time, he said, many requests cover sensitive issues that require cutting through a thicket of pending lawsuits and classified documents, as well as checking with other government agencies and the White House. All those efforts can interfere with prosecutors’ day-to-day work, he added.

    ”The people in the department who must answer these inquiries are many of the same people who are making key operational decisions in the war on terrorism,” Carr said.

    Mukasey, a retired federal judge, was sworn in to his new job in November. He inherited from Gonzales a contentious relationship with Congress and a shortage of personnel.

    More than a dozen senior Justice Department officials resigned last year as congressional and internal probes of political interference intensified, adding to the disarray at Washington headquarters. In 2007, officials spent 30,000 hours responding to Congress over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, the department said.

    The management void showed, congressional aides said, as letters went unanswered for months. Hundreds of questions posed to Gonzales at a July oversight hearing were answered by Justice officials more than six months later, in January, on the eve of Mukasey’s first appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

    Replies to follow-up questions posed to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III shortly after a March 2007 hearing were provided to the Senate in late January, in a document marked “current” as of July 31, 2007, according to a copy.

    As the Gonzales-era responses lagged, new questions arose. In the past three months, the Senate Judiciary Committee has demanded data on lucrative corporate monitoring contracts that Justice Department officials awarded without competitive bidding. The information has not been provided.

    But most of the pending legislative requests cover national security. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) spotlighted the issue in a floor speech nearly three years ago but is still waiting for key policy memos on detainee treatment, aides said this week.

    Rep. John Conyers Jr., another Michigan Democrat and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, last week renewed his request for a complete version of an October 2001 policy memo covering presidential war powers within the United States. “The notion that the President can claim to operate under ‘secret’ powers known only to the President and a select few subordinates is antithetical to the core principles of this democracy,” Conyers wrote.

    Some of the information at issue dates to the early months of the Bush administration, when authorities developed a secret electronic surveillance program after Sept. 11, 2001, that allowed government officials to snoop without warrants. Lawmakers have long sought a key legal opinion covering that activity and a later document that amended it.

    Justice Department officials have said that they deserve credit, however, for releasing – last Tuesday – a 2003 opinion approving harsh military interrogation tactics. “Following a request of Senator Levin, DOD [the Defense Department] conducted a declassification review and determined that it would be appropriate to declassify the memorandum at this time,” Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said.

    ”The public disclosure … represents an accommodation of Congress’s oversight,” he added. But the American Civil Liberties Union, which had sued to obtain the document under the Freedom of Information Act, maintains that it was released “as the result” of that lawsuit, and that otherwise its existence would not be public.

    Other documents requested by Congress could shed light on the reasons the Bush administration fired the nine U.S. attorneys and what role the White House and political appointees may have played. House lawyers recently sued to gain access to that material and to witnesses, after the Bush administration cited executive privilege and refused to hand them over.

    But Senate Democratic aides said they doubt that controversial legal opinions drafted after the Sept. 11 attacks and in ensuing years will see the light of day until a new president assumes office in January.

 

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    Go to Original

    Requested, Not Released
    The Washington Post

    Tuesday 08 April 2008

    The Justice Department has yet to respond to congressional requests for information on matters including:

·         An Oct. 23, 2001, Office of Legal Counsel opinion describing presidential authority for domestic military operations dealing with terrorism.

·         An Aug. 1, 2002, Office of Legal Counsel memo spelling out interrogation techniques the CIA could apply to detainees.

·         Fee data on no-bid corporate monitoring contracts that prosecutors arranged to resolve criminal charges against businesses.

·         Documents and e-mail messages regarding the firing of nine U.S. attorneys.

·         Testimony about the firings from White House aides Joshua B. Bolten and Harriet Miers.

·         Records related to videotapes portraying the CIA’s interrogation of detainees.

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Why do CEO’s Profit as their companies go down?

Corporate Croesus
    The New York Times | Editorial

    Tuesday 08 April 2008

    As accustomed as we are to the other-worldly rewards lavished on captains of finance and industry, it is still galling that the chiefs managed to finagle a raise last year as many of the companies they led were in trouble.

    A study published on Sunday by The Times of many of the biggest companies found that chief executives who had held their jobs for at least two years got an average pay increase of 5 percent last year, despite poor results at many of their companies.

    Net income at Office Depot fell 23 percent last year compared with 2006; its share price fell 64 percent. Steve Odland, its chief, made nearly $18 million all told – some 85 percent more than in 2006. With the share price of Toll Brothers, the luxury home builder, plummeting, it seems reasonable that Robert Toll, its chief, got no bonus. Still, the company took steps to ensure that he gets one this year, even if home-building doesn’t recover.

    It’s hard to square the conceit that chief executives are rewarded for improving companies’ performance with the fact that chiefs at 10 financial-services firms in the study made $320 million last year, even as their banks reported mortgage-related losses of $55 billion.

    Meanwhile, the average earnings of typical workers have failed to keep up with inflation in four of the past five years. According to the economists Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, average incomes in the highest-earning 1 percent of the United States grew 11 percent year-over-year between 2002 and 2006. Incomes in the bottom 99 percent grew by 0.9 percent annually over the period. This year looks bad, too.

    This polarization is producing a pattern of income distribution rarely seen outside Africa or Latin America, and unheard of in the United States, at least since the gilded age. In 2006, the 15,000 families in the top 0.01 percent of the income distribution – earning at least $10.7 million apiece – pocketed 3.48 percent of the nation’s total income, double their share in 1993.

    Some analysts argue that the spectacular rise in executive pay is to be expected in a marketplace in which bigger and bigger firms compete for talent. Others suggest it has more to do with the ability of chief executives to manipulate their boards to set their own pay.

    In any case, the combination of inexorable income growth at the very apex of society and stagnation everywhere else can serve no public good.

    The Bush administration has focused its economic policies on cutting taxes for the very richest Americans. Taxation needs urgently to become more progressive. If the United States is to continue to embrace globalization, technological innovation and other forces that contribute to economic growth, it has to share the spoils better.

  

 

Questions about FBI Spying and Data Transfers

This whole area is quite disturbing.  I recently heard that companies who provide internet service and email accounts may also be involved.  Apparently Google Mail, (gmail) is contracted out locally regionally.  Who knows how all the different small providers handle the accounts.  It makes one wonder if AOL, Fox, MSN, even Microsoft itself could be involved in these schemes.  Anybody have any insight into this?  GFS 

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 FBI Data Transfers Via Telecoms Questioned
    By Ellen Nakashima
    The Washington Post

    Tuesday 08 April 2008

    When FBI investigators probing New York prostitution rings, Boston organized crime or potential terrorist plots anywhere want access to a suspect’s telephone contacts, technicians at a telecommunications carrier served with a government order can, with the click of a mouse, instantly transfer key data along a computer circuit to an FBI technology office in Quantico.

    The circuits – little-known electronic connections between telecom firms and FBI monitoring personnel around the country – are used to tell the government who is calling whom, along with the time and duration of a conversation and even the locations of those involved.

    Recently, three Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, including Chairman John D. Dingell (Mich.), sent a letter to colleagues citing privacy concerns over one of the Quantico circuits and demanding more information about it. Anxieties about whether such electronic links are too intrusive form a backdrop to the continuing congressional debate over modifications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs federal surveillance.

    Since a 1994 law required telecoms to build electronic interception capabilities into their systems, the FBI has created a network of links between the nation’s largest telephone and Internet firms and about 40 FBI offices and Quantico, according to interviews and documents describing the agency’s Digital Collection System. The documents were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group in San Francisco that specializes in digital-rights issues.

    The bureau says its budget for the collection system increased from $30 million in 2007 to $40 million in 2008. Information lawfully collected by the FBI from telecom firms can be shared with law enforcement and intelligence-gathering partners, including the National Security Agency and the CIA. Likewise, under guidelines approved by the attorney general or a court, some intercept data gathered by intelligence agencies can be shared with law enforcement agencies.

    ”When you’re building something like this deeply into the telecommunications infrastructure, when it becomes so technically easy to do, the only thing that stands between legitimate use and abuse is the complete honesty of the persons and agencies using it and the ability to have independent oversight over the system’s use,” said Lauren Weinstein, a communications systems engineer and co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility, a group that studies Web issues. “It’s who watches the listeners.”

    Different versions of the system are used for criminal wiretaps and for foreign intelligence investigations inside the United States. But each allows authorized FBI agents and analysts, with point-and-click ease, to receive e-mails, instant messages, cellphone calls and other communications that tell them not only what a suspect is saying, but where he is and where he has been, depending on the wording of a court order or a government directive. Most of the wiretapping is done at field offices.

    Wiretaps to obtain the content of a phone call or an e-mail must be authorized by a court upon a showing of probable cause. But “transactional data” about a communication – from whom, to whom, how long it lasted – can be obtained by simply showing that it is relevant to an official probe, including through an administrative subpoena known as a national security letter (NSL). According to the Justice Department’s inspector general, the number of NSLs issued by the FBI soared from 8,500 in 2000 to 47,000 in 2005.

    The administration has proposed expanding the types of data it can get from telecom carriers under the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, so FBI agents can gain faster and more detailed access to information sent by wireless devices that reveals where a person is in real time. The Federal Communications Commission is weighing the request.

    ”Court-authorized electronic surveillance is a critical tool in pursuing both criminal and terrorist subjects,” FBI spokesman Richard Kolko said.

    A Justice Department spokesman said the government is asking only for information at the beginning and end of a communication, and for information “reasonably available” in a carrier’s network.

    Al Gidari, a telecom industry lawyer at Perkins Coie in Seattle who handles wiretap orders for companies, said government officials now “have to rely on a human being at a telecom calling up every 15 minutes to send law enforcement the data.”

    He added: “What they want is an automatic feed, continuously. So you’re checking the weather on your mobile device or making a call,” and the device would transmit location data automatically. “It’s full tracking capability. It’s a scary proposition.”

    In an affidavit circulated on Capitol Hill, security consultant Babak Pasdar alleged that a telecom carrier he had worked for maintained a high-speed DS-3 digital line that co-workers referred to as “the Quantico Circuit.” He said it allowed a third party “unfettered” access to the carrier’s wireless network, including billing records and customer data transmitted wirelessly.

    He was hired to upgrade network security for Verizon in 2003; sources other than Pasdar said the carrier in his affidavit is Verizon.

    Dingell and his colleagues said House members should be given access to information to help them evaluate Pasdar’s allegations.

    FBI officials said a circuit of the type described by Pasdar does not exist. All telecom circuits at Quantico are one-way, from the carrier, said Anthony Di Clemente, section chief of the FBI operational technology division. He also said any transmissions of data to Quantico are strictly pursuant to court orders.

    Records, including who sent and received communications, the duration and the time, are kept for evidentiary purposes and to support applications to extend wiretap orders, he said.

    Verizon spokesman Peter Thonis said no government agency has open access to the company’s networks through electronic circuits.

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