Today’s Must Read

Just in time for this week’s Senate intelligence committee’s fight over telecom immunity: Verizon disclosed to three Democratic lawmakers that it turned over subscriber information, such as IP addresses or phone records, to the FBI in emergency situations more than 720 times. In making such warrant-free demands of Verizon — and surely other telecommunications companies — the FBI wanted not just information on whom the target of its investigation contacted, but also the people whom the contacts contacted.

That’s called “community of interest” information. Last month, The New York Times reported that the FBI has suspended seeking such data pending an inspector general’s investigation into the use of national security letters. Verizon did not comply with the community-of-interest request, but only because it doesn’t store such information. Presumably other telecom providers — who did not respond to Congressional requests for details about their compliance with the FBI — do. (Verizon would only discuss what it disclosed to the FBI, not anything having to do with warrantless NSA surveillance. And the relationship between those agencies’ surveillance programs is still a big unknown.) Quick, has anyone you know emailed anyone who’s called Pakistan lately?

These warrant-free disclosures concerned not just potential terrorism, but also child-predator and kidnapping cases — what The Washington Post calls “a range of investigations.” Lawyers for AT&T and Verizon told House Democrats John Dingell (D-MI), Ed Markey (D-MA) and Bart Stupak (D-MI) that they typically comply with the emergency requests expeditiously, trusting that the FBI is acting legally:

AT&T and Verizon both argued that the onus should not be on the companies to determine whether the government has lawfully requested customer records. To do so in emergency cases would “slow lawful efforts to protect the public,” wrote Randal S. Milch, senior vice president of legal and external affairs for Verizon Business, a subsidiary of Verizon Communications.

“Public officials, not private businessmen, must ultimately be responsible for whether the legal judgments underlying authorized surveillance activities turn out to be right or wrong — legally or politically,” wrote Wayne Watts, AT&T’s senior executive vice president and general counsel. “Telecommunications carriers have a part to play in guarding against official abuses, but it is necessarily a modest one.”

You can read Verizon’s letter to the three Democrats here (pdf). AT&T’s is here (pdf), and a third, from Qwest, is here (pdf).

Expect oversight of FBI national security letter and exigent letter requests to play a large role in tomorrow’s confirmation hearing for Attorney General-designee Michael Mukasey. And that’s not all: on Thursday the Senate intelligence committee will mark up — in secret, says the ACLU — its version of FISA reform. Civil liberties groups already fear that the Senate bill contains retroactive telecom immunity. We’ll soon see whether Verizon’s disclosures give senators pause.