This past Thursday I received an urgent voice mail to call Verizon’s "High Toll Fraud Department". The message stressed that this was not a sales call and to return the call immediately and have the account number for my landline phone handy. Though at work and needed in a meeting, I called back right away, sure that someone had somehow rung up thousands of dollars on my account. If you’ve ever gotten one of those calls from a credit card company, you know what I mean. Usually, by the time you get the call, someone has already spent a lot of money. When it turned out Verizon’s alarm bells were set off because of a legitimate 35-cent phone call to Germany, I was initially relieved. But the questions they asked set off my bullshit detector big time. I had to get to the meeting so couldn’t stay on the phone, but the more I thought about it, the more it bugged me. (No pun intended.)
Thursday was not a great day for Verizon. I was well aware of the NARAL dispute, had already put together a draft email to my pro-choice friends about it and was thinking about who might be my new landline carrier. None of this had anything to do with the phone call though, just a coincidence, but my radar was up.
Anyway, what the high toll fraud rep said was that they were concerned about a phone call to Germany that was less than one minute in length placed on September 11th. It was to a number that, according to their records, I hadn’t dialed before and they wanted to know if someone who was not authorized had possibly made the call.
Okay, first thing, Verizon has been my local carrier with the same phone number for over 20 years. I switched from AT&T long distance to Verizon about 6 months ago and added one of their international calling plans. Although it’s a residential plan, I use the phone for business and have customers all over the world. Though most business is done by email now, I still spend about $50-$100 in long distance charges every month.
So why the alarm bells then? A single fax to a hotel in Frankfurt doesn’t seem the least bit odd to me. But the inflection of her voice when she said "September 11th" said it all. On September 4th German authorities broke up an alleged terror plot. On September 26, the day before the phone call from the fraud dept. The Washington Post had a new article on the plot.
...detonators were smuggled into Germany from Syria through Turkey and that the suspects were days away from acting on plans to target Americans in Europe.
snip
Investigators said the suspects had assembled ingredients for building homemade bombs and had intended to attack Americans in Germany, possibly at Ramstein Air Base and the U.S. Consulate in Frankfurt.
Snip
"We know we have a lot of people in Germany who are suspected of becoming terrorists," he said. "It is a delicate issue. We don't have enough evidence to make it a legal situation. But we know they are linked to a terrorist network. . . . Now we have to watch them."
Yes, they have to watch them. Just like the U.S. has been watching us, through willing surrogates like Verizon.
You may also remember that the director of national intelligence, Vice Admiral Mike McConnell, falsely testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs this month on the subject.
McConnell) proudly claimed a victory for the new Protect America Act -- the broad new surveillance law McConnell helped push through Congress last month that revised the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. McConnell claimed that three German terrorism suspects arrested last week for plotting to blow up nightclubs frequented by U.S. military personnel had come to the attention of German authorities thanks to U.S. intercepts made possible by the new law.
Only one problem: it had been widely reported that the suspects had been under surveillance for months. The Protect America Act wasn't even a month old at the time of their arrest. Almost immediately, intelligence officials queried by Newsweek's Mike Isikoff and Mark Hosenball backtracked on McConnell's dubious statement.
McConnell then had to retract his statement.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m all for breaking up terror plots and putting the bad guys in jail. I live about 10 blocks from ground zero, was here on 9/11 with my two daughters and do not want to see what a new attack might look like. But I do not live in fear of it or want to throw the Constitution down the toilet because of it.
It seems fairly obvious to me that through data mining, this 35-cent phone call was identified as being suspicious in some way so Verizon called the customer just to be sure that the call was authorized. If the Government says that’s all legal now, (though I don’t believe it) I might be able to put up with inquiries like this to a certain degree. What is inexcusable and indicative of the unstable legal ground they are standing on is that Verizon almost certainly called me under false pretenses and lied about the reason for the call. A call from the high toll fraud department for a 35-cent call? Are you kidding me? Tell the truth. Tell your customer we data mined your call, it was suspicious for some reason, and we want to know what it was so the nations bedwetters can sleep at night.
In 2006 a class action lawsuit was brought by the ACLU against the NSA to contest the illegal spying. Although the lawsuit was dismissed this past July, the government and phone companies seem to still be on very shaky legal ground.
In July 2007, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the case, ruling the plaintiffs in the case — which includes scholars, journalists, and national nonprofit organizations — had no standing to sue because they could not state with certainty that they have been wiretapped by the NSA.
...the ruling "did not uphold the legality of the government’s warrantless surveillance activity. Indeed, the only judge to discuss the merits clearly and unequivocally declared that the warrantless surveillance was unlawful."
While writing this I’ve decided the first thing to do is alert the ACLU. The second thing is to start looking for a new carrier. I have no interest in supporting companies that are complicit in illegal wiretapping activities and have their fraud department call its customers under false pretenses. Not that it will be easy to do, what with the old monopolies creeping back. The phone is used primarily for business and finding a carrier that can compete with all the needed services is difficult. I’d already jettisoned AT&T largely because of price, but knowing that they were at the forefront of the NSA scandal made it a pleasure and easy to do, even after 20 years of loyalty. I also got rid of AT&T wireless for essentially the same reasons in favor of T-Mobile. (How ironic is that. Going to a German phone company for a better sense of privacy?)
When I do make the switch, Verizon will be notified as to why. The only thing that will prevent companies from taking positions like this is if their customers take their business elsewhere. The NARAL controversy proved that. Verizon had to make a major reversal in a matter of hours when confronted with a virtual shitstorm from irate customers. Imagine if that had happened a couple of years ago when the news surfaced that AT&T and Verizon illegally aided and abetted the Government by spying on its own customers. Had millions of customers (myself included) immediately cancelled their accounts and switched to other carriers, history might have been changed.
Update- Changed title for the hell of it.