New Jersey lawyers Bruce Afran and Carl Mayer filed suit yesterday in Manhattan federal court against Verizon for contracting with the Government to provide it with customer phone records. They are contemplating additional suits against AT&T and Bell South.

Orin Kerr, a former federal prosecutor and assistant professor at George Washington University, said his reading of the relevant statutes put the phone companies at risk for at least $1,000 per person whose records they disclosed without a court order.

"This is not a happy day for the general counsels" of the phone companies, he said. "If you have a class action involving 10 million Americans, that's 10 million times $1,000 -- that's 10 billion."

President Bush gave a commencement address in Mississippi today. On the NSA phone records collection, he said:

"We are not mining or trolling through the personal lives of innocent Americans," Bush said before leaving for a commencement address at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College in Biloxi.

The transcript is here.

Right -- as if anyone is going to believe him. The ACLU is calling for a full investigation of the NSA data-mining of phone records.

TPMmuckraker writes:

Reps. Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS) and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) have put out a statement questioning the legality of the program. Their statement contains this: "when the Attorney General was forced to testify before the House Judiciary Committee a few weeks ago, he misled the Committee about the existence of the program."

They are referring to Gonzales' April 6 hearing testimony (pdf) and his answers to questions posed by Rep. Gerald Nadler.

There is much more going on than even the massive datamining discussed in USA Today. The NSA domestic phone record spying program was largely outed by a whistleblower, Mark Klein, who worked at AT&T.

AT&T provided National Security Agency eavesdroppers with full access to its customers' phone calls, and shunted its customers' internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center, according to a former AT&T worker cooperating in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against the company.

Mark Klein, a retired AT&T communications technician, submitted an affidavit in support of the EFF's lawsuit this week. That class action lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco last January, alleges that AT&T violated federal and state laws by surreptitiously allowing the government to monitor phone and internet communications of AT&T customers without warrants.

The ACLU's lawsuit against Bush's NSA warrantless surveillance program is set for hearing in federal court in Michigan on June 12. Today, the organization announced that 72 members of Congress, led by Rep. John Conyers, have filed a friend of court brief. The ACLU reports (press release, will be online soon here):

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Michigan, seeks a court order declaring that the NSA spying is illegal and ordering its immediate and permanent halt.

The disclosure that the National Security Agency has been collecting and analyzing phone records of tens of millions of Americans has struck a chord. Here are some of the reactions, and some of the reasons this is such a big deal.

From Jim Harper, Cato Institute's director of information policy studies and a member of the Department of Homeland Security Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee (not online yet, received by e-mail):

• "It flies in the face of Fourth Amendment principles that call for reasonableness or probable cause. It is not reasonable to monitor every American's phone calling in a search for terrorists.

• The program was not authorized by Congress and it flies in the face of Congress' intent when it de-funded the Total Information Awareness program because of concerns about the privacy consequences of 'data mining.'

USA Today reports that the National Security Agency has been collecting billions of domestic home, business and cell phone records on tens of millions of Americans, obtaining the records from phone companies.

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans -- most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

There's more information here:

While many will take General Michael Hayden's statement to Sen. Dick Durbin that he would consider an Amendment to FISA for Bush's warrantless electronic spying program as cause to support him, I don't.

Durbin, after a 35-minute meeting Wednesday with Hayden, said the nominee for CIA director told him: "With all the publicity that has surrounded this program, we may be closer to the possibility of asking for a change in FISA." "He didn't say he would," Durbin added.

Democrats should think twice before tinkering with FISA. We'll be headed down that slippery slope and the risk is that this will only be the beginning. Bush next will bring the debate from conversations between one person outside the country and one person inside the country to conversations between two people inside the country. And then there will be a move to reduce the protections in Title III, which regulates eavesdropping on Americans in criminal investigations.

Sen. Arlen Specter's proposal is terrible. The warrantless eavesdropping program has not been particularly effective.

A few days ago, I reported that the New York Times named CIA agent Mary McCarthy as the source of the leak of classified information for Dana Priest's Washington Post article on secret prisons.

Newsweek has just published an article in which a colleague of McCarthy's says she denies being a source for Priest's article.

Other sources have told Newsweek that McCarthy was the source.

But government officials familiar with the matter confirmed to NEWSWEEK that McCarthy, a 20-year veteran of the CIA's intelligence--or analytical-- branch, was the individual in question.

The New York Times reports the identity of the fired senior CIA employee who disclosed information on the CIA's secret prisons to WaPo reporter Dana Priest.

The C.I.A. would not identify the leaker, but several government officials said it was Mary O. McCarthy, a veteran intelligence analyst who until 2001 was senior director for intelligence programs at the National Security Council, where she served under Presidents Clinton and Bush. . At the time of her dismissal, Ms. McCarthy was working in the agency's inspector general's office, after a four-year stint at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based organization that examines global security issues.

Agent McCarthy apparently 'fessed up after failing a lie detector:

At least it's out in the open. The Washington Times Reports:

The new Open Source Center (OSC) at CIA headquarters recently stepped up data collection and analysis based on bloggers worldwide and is developing new methods to gauge the reliability of the content, said OSC Director Douglas J. Naquin.

"A lot of blogs now have become very big on the Internet, and we're getting a lot of rich information on blogs that are telling us a lot about social perspectives and everything from what the general feeling is to ... people putting information on there that doesn't exist anywhere else," Mr. Naquin told The Washington Times.

]Hat tip Patriot Daily.]

by TChris

A reservist, anxious to return to Minnesota after serving eight months in Iraq, was detained in Los Angeles for more than an hour because his name appeared on a "watch list" of suspected terrorists. Marine Staff Sgt. Daniel Brown's name was listed after TSA discovered gunpowder residue on his boots last June -- "likely left over from a previous two-month tour in Iraq."