{"id":7438,"date":"2006-05-17T13:53:50","date_gmt":"2006-05-17T17:53:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=7438"},"modified":"2006-05-17T13:53:50","modified_gmt":"2006-05-17T17:53:50","slug":"dni-can-give-telecoms-a-get-out-of-jail-free-card","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/dni-can-give-telecoms-a-get-out-of-jail-free-card\/","title":{"rendered":"DNI can give telecoms a get out of jail free card"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t mean to belabor the point, but it just doesn’t make sense that telecommunications companies are denying having cooperated with the NSA on its phone-records database. Think Progress uncovered<\/a> a presidential memorandum, however, that may shed some light on the subject.<\/p>\n

Ordinarily, a company that conceals their transactions and activities from the public would violate securities law. But an presidential memorandum signed by the President on May 5<\/a> allows the Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, to authorize a company to conceal activities related to national security<\/a>. (See 15 U.S.C. 78m(b)(3)(A))<\/p>\n

There is no evidence that this executive order has been used by John Negroponte with respect to the telcos. Of course, if it was used, we wouldn’t know about it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This would explain a lot. As Salon’s Tim Grieve explained<\/a>, based on this directive, Negroponte is in a position to “free companies who cooperate with him from the obligation to record — and potentially reveal — the activities in which they’re engaged. And what does that mean? Negroponte now apparently has the power to allow the telephone companies that have been turning over telephone records to the NSA to keep their “transactions” — the payments they’re getting from the NSA — off of their books.”<\/p>\n

Does this explain BellSouth’s and Verizon’s denials? It’s too soon to say for sure, but it’s an interesting presidential directive, isn’t it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t mean to belabor the point, but it just doesn’t make sense that telecommunications companies are denying having cooperated with the NSA on its phone-records database. Think Progress uncovered a presidential memorandum, however, that may shed some light on the subject. Ordinarily, a company that conceals their transactions and activities from the public would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7438\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}