On Cusp of Senate Telecom Immunity Passage, White House Admits Phone Companies Spied

On Cusp of Senate Telecom Immunity Passage, White House Admits Phone Companies Spied - Via Threat Level:

Just hours before the Senate is about to pass a bill giving amnesty to spying telecoms and legalizing the government's warrantless wiretapping program, the White House finally came clean and admitted what everyone already knows: the phone companies helped the government datamine your phone records and wiretap Americans.

At today's press briefing, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino responded in a non-sequitor to a question about whether telecoms were asked to spy on Americans months before 9/11 by saying:

"The telephone companies that were alleged to have helped their country after 9/11 did so because they are patriotic and they certainly helped us and they helped us save lives," Perino said.

It's unclear why Perino felt obliged to use the word alleged, though it may be just out of sheer force of habits.

The admission could help the lawsuits pending against telecoms such as AT&T and Verizon, except that the Democrat-controlled Senate is set to deprive Americans of their right to seek redress in a court of law. The admission also contradicts the government's longstanding position that confirming or denying any of the spying allegation would cause "exceptionally grave harm to the the national security," to use the government's words (.pdf) used in the court case against Verizon.

But there it is, straight from the podium. Just as everyone has known that the nation's telecoms spied on Americans, we've also known that the government's "national security" claims were overblown and intended to protect themselves politically. And now that they've won, there's no resaon for them to pretend otherwise.

The telecoms did it. And surely they were, as Perino described it, motivated by deep patriotic feelings and their decisions had nothing to do with secret government contracts from the NSA or favorable regulatory rulings that have helped keep the U.S. falling behind in broadband rankings.

(For FISA fanatics, yup, Threat Level clearly remembers that the Michael McConnell, the serial exaggerator who runs the Office of National Intelligence, made this admission this summer. But this is the first time we know of that the White House admits the telecoms helped.)

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