From left field: If you want a different perspective on what’s happening in the mainstream media’s coverage of the National Secret Agency’s domestic spying program, truck on over to the World Socialist Web Site. Columnist Patrick Martin writes that “the media commentary has deliberately downplayed the sinister nature of the program. This is a deliberate cover-up of what is without question the most wide-ranging invasion of privacy by the federal government in US history.”

Maybe Martin has a point. Several, actually. Like most socialists, he’s rather long-winded, so I’ve performed the valuable service of extracting his main points in a more succinct, edited form. Read the full version here.

There has not been a single serious media commentary questioning why a supposedly “narrowly focused” program should collect data on an estimated 225 million Americans.

Computer programs used by NSA to analyze phone call databases it purchased from the big telecommunications companies are an advanced form of the “social-network analysis” software used by commercial and political marketing firms to profile potential advertising targets. Phone trees are traced to identify nodes and determine common interests and activities among those targeted.

The purpose is to select targets for more intensive electronic surveillance or arrest and detention.

‘This is almost certainly the largest single intrusion into American civil liberties ever committed by any US administration.’
— Bruce Afran

Every person who has ever telephoned a 900 number, for instance, now has that fact permanently recorded in a government database, making him or her vulnerable to blackmail by federal agents. Likewise for those whose phone records suggest problems with gambling, narcotics abuse, or even extramarital affairs.

AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth provided the NSA with the calling records on 224 million land-line and cellular telephone customers — 80 percent of the land-line and 50 percent of the wireless users in the U.S.

The three companies connected 500 billion telephone calls in 2005 alone, and over two trillion since 9/11. Information on all these calls — number calling, number dialed, time and duration — is now in the NSA database, along with historical information of unknown but vast dimensions.

No previous regime, no matter how dictatorial — not Nazi Germany, not Stalinist Russia — was able to compile such an all-encompassing record of the private activities of its citizens.

The press reports claim that NSA did not actually eavesdrop on the phone calls, collecting only external information. First, even if true, this is a gross violation of personal privacy that would, in an ordinary police investigation, require probable cause to obtain a court order. Second, and more importantly, there is no reason to believe that NSA program was confined to call detail records and involved no eavesdropping.

Media reports on the surveillance program invariably state that the telephone company records were handed over to the NSA without names and addresses of the customers, implying an effort to preserve confidentiality. Even the simplest Internet search can pull up names associated with particular phone numbers, and the federal government has access to many more databases than those search engines.

By cross-referencing phone numbers with databases that link numbers to names and addresses, the government could compile dossiers of the people and organizations every American is in contact with.

For all the hemming and hawing in Congress and in media editorials, the lawless character of the Bush administration’s telephone spying is unquestionable. The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution spells out the right to be free of illegal searches in unmistakable terms: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

In the Qwest-NSA discussions, the agency consistently refused to seek a court order or present a directive from the U.S. attorney general compelling the company’s cooperation. Tacitly acknowledging that it had no legal authority, NSA sought Qwest’s voluntary cooperation, just as it had obtained the voluntary cooperation of AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth.

At least three other telecommunications firms — Verizon Wireless, Cingular Wireless and T-Mobile USA Inc. — deny participating in the NSA program, and the Internet companies Google, AOL and the MSN unit of Microsoft also declared they did not supply consumer information to the agency.

If the program was, as the Bush administration claims, vital for defending the American people from a new 9/11, how is the failure to enlist these companies to be explained? The administration knew its requests were without legal authority, and sought to conceal its mass snooping campaign rather than seek court orders against noncomplying companies.

There is ample reason to believe that the telecommunications companies themselves violated the law by handing over masses of consumer information to the NSA.

In 1986 Congress passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, in response to a 1979 Supreme Court decision, Smith v. Maryland, which allowed local police to obtain phone records without a warrant. The high court ruled by analogy to ordinary mail service, finding that the contents of the envelope were private, but the address written on the outside was not. Similarly, the court argued, there should be no expectation of privacy for the phone number dialed or the email address used to send an electronic message.

Congress overturned this precedent in the 1986 law, which declares, in Section 2702, that providers of “electronic communications … shall not knowingly divulge a record or other information pertaining to a subscriber or customer … to any government entity.” Since then, local police have been required to show probable cause and get a search warrant from a court to obtain the record of anyone’s telephone calls. Companies that violate the law can be compelled to pay damages of $1,000 per violation per customer.

The first lawsuit under the 1986 law was filed Friday against Verizon in a Manhattan federal court. Bruce Afran, one of the lawyers, declared, “This is almost certainly the largest single intrusion into American civil liberties ever committed by any US administration. Americans expect their phone records to be private. That’s our bedrock governing principle of our phone system.”

The scale of the damages is staggering: with trillions of phone calls disclosed, at $1,000 each, any award that was proportional to the scale of the violation would bankrupt the corporations that collaborated with the illegal spying.