"Our members have worked for years with law enforcement with an objective to preserve lawfully authorized surveillance," said Tom Amontree, a spokesman for the US Telecom Association, the industry group representing most phone companies.
"We have no comment on national security matters."Added Eric Rabe, a spokesman for Verizon Communications Inc., one of the nation's phone giants: "We typically make law enforcement agencies get a court order. Our default is to cooperate, but we don't feel we should appropriate customer information lightly. We try to make sure what we do is in compliance with the law.
"During the Cold War, telecom organizations freely cooperated with government agencies regarding national security, and there seemed to be little worry about whether the requests were accompanied by court orders, one expert said.
"In the 1960s, I worked for an international telex and telegram carrier in their Washington office," said Bob Atkinson, policy research director of the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information. "Every day a government agent stopped by to pick up copies of all telegrams that were sent overseas."I asked about it once and was told we'd been making copies available to the government since World War II."I think the practice only ended when people stopped sending telegrams."
Sniff. The poor terrorists. Spied upon for decades. Thank heavens the liberals have gotten wind of this and will finally put a stop to the monitoring of what our enemies are saying to one another. Isn't fair, us being so big and they so small, why they could even be considered...dare I say it...minorities!
[Meanwhile...somewhere in New York Charles Schumer jolts awake from a peaceful nap and shouts EUREKA...]
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