GCHQ's BEYOND TOP SECRET Middle Eastern INTERNET SPY BASE

The secret British spy base is part of a programme codenamed “CIRCUIT” and also referred to as Overseas Processing Centre 1 (OPC-1). It is located at Seeb, on the northern coast of Oman, where it taps in to various undersea cables passing through the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian/Arabian Gulf. Seeb is one of a three site GCHQ network in Oman, at locations codenamed “TIMPANI”, “GUITAR” and “CLARINET”. TIMPANI, near the Strait of Hormuz, can monitor Iraqi communications. CLARINET, in the south of Oman, is strategically close to Yemen.

British national telco BT, referred to within GCHQ and the American NSA under the ultra-classified codename “REMEDY”, and Vodafone Cable (which owns the former Cable & Wireless company, aka “GERONTIC”) are the two top earners of secret GCHQ payments running into tens of millions of pounds annually.

The Seeb spy base. Not in your name? My dear boy, that's the whole point

The actual locations of such codenamed “access points” into the worldwide cable backbone are classified 3 levels above Top Secret and labelled “Strap 3”. The true identities of the companies hidden behind codenames such as “REMEDY”, “GERONTIC”, “STREETCAR” or “PINNAGE” are classified one level below this, at “Strap 2”.

After these details were withheld, the government opted not to move against the Guardian newspaper last year for publishing above-top-secret information at the lower level designated “Strap 1”. This included details of the billion-pound interception storage system, Project TEMPORA, which were revealed in 2013 and which have triggered Parliamentary enquiries in Britain and Europe, and cases at the European Court of Human Rights. 

The Guardian was forced to destroy hard drives of leaked information to prevent political embarrassment over extensive commercial arrangements with these and other telecommunications companies who have secretly agreed to tap their own and their customers’ or partners’ overseas cables for the intelligence agency GCHQ. Intelligence chiefs also wished to conceal the identities of countries helping GCHQ and its US partner the NSA by sharing information or providing facilities.

... the intelligence agency annually pays selected companies tens of millions of pounds to run secret teams which install hidden connections which copy customers' data and messages to the spooks’ processing centres. The GCHQ-contracted companies also install optical fibre taps or “probes” into equipment belonging to other companies without their knowledge or consent. Within GCHQ, each company has a special section called a “Sensitive Relationship Team” or SRT.

BT and Vodafone/C&W also operate extensive long distance optical fibre communications networks throughout the UK, installed and paid for by GCHQ, NSA, or by a third and little known UK intelligence support organization called the National Technical Assistance Centre (NTAC).

... every time GCHQ wanted to tap a new international optical fibre cable, engineers from “REMEDY” (BT) would usually be called in to plan where the taps or “probe” would physically be connected to incoming optical fibre cables, and to agree how much BT should be paid. 

The spooks' secret UK access network feeds Internet data from more than 18 submarine cables coming into different parts of Britain either direct to GCHQ in Cheltenham or to its remote processing station at Bude in Cornwall.

Among the cables specifically identified in one document as currently being intercepted or “on cover” are an Irish connection, Hibernia Atlantic, landing in Southport, and three European connections landing at Yarmouth, Dover, and Brighton.

(By Duncan Campbell)

DHS Emergency Power Extended

The Obama administration has given the Department of Homeland Security powers to prioritize government communications over privately owned telephone and Internet systems in emergencies.

An executive order signed June 6 “gives DHS the authority to seize control of telecommunications facilities, including telephone, cellular and wireless networks, in order to prioritize government communications over private ones in an emergency,” said Amie Stephanovich, a lawyer with the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

The White House says Executive Order 13618, published Wednesday in the Federal Register, is designed to ensure that the government can communicate during major disasters and other emergencies and contains no new authority.

“The [order] recognizes the creation of DHS and provides the Secretary the flexibility to organize the communications systems and functions that reside within the department as [she] believes will be most effective,”White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said in an email. “The [order] does not transfer authorities between or among departments.”

She said the order replaced one originally signed in 1984 by President Reagan and amended in 2003 by President George W. Bush after DHSwas set up and took responsibility for emergency response and communications.

When the original order “was written during the Cold War, the motivating national security concern was maintaining communications capability following a devastating nuclear strike,” Ms. Hayden said.

The new order “address[es] a world in which our economy and government are far more reliant on communications technologies to maintain essential functions than we were then,” she wrote.

At issue is a provision of the four-page order that says Homeland Security Secretary Janet A. Napolitano “shall … satisfy [federal] priority communications requirements through the use of commercial, government, and privately owned communications resources.”

“The previous orders did not give DHS those authorities over private and commercial networks,” Ms. Stepanovich said. “That’s a new authority.”

“This should have been done by Congress, so there could have been proper debate about it,” she added. “This is not authority that should be granted by executive order.”

Ms. Hayden said the legal basis for the order is Section 706 of the 1934 Communications Act. The section authorizes the president to “cause the closing of any facility or station for wire communication” and gives him “control of any such facility or station” if a state of war, or the threat of one, exists.

The new order “extends Section 706 powers to the Internet,” said James Harper, an electronic-privacy advocate at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

The authorities “might have made sense in the 1930s,” but now the communication networks are too complex and interdependent, he said. “If you try to seize control of the Internet that way, you will break it.”

Under the previous executive orders, communications providers have long established priority access programs for federal users. In the telephone system, a special code the user inputs before dialing a number automatically tells the phone companies’ equipment to give the call priority.

“Mobile phones, the Internet, and social media are all now integral to the communications landscape,” Ms. Hayden said.

Via: "The Washington Times"

The Secret State's Surveillance Machine

Underming the American People's Right to Privacy

Following the Money Trail: Telecoms and ISPs

by Tom Burghardt
Source: Antifascist Calling...
December 11, 2009
Courtesy Of Global Research

"Follow the money."

And why not. As the interface between state and private criminality, following the money trail is oxygen and combustible fuel for rooting out corruption in high places: indelible signs left behind like toxic tracks by our sociopathic masters.

After all, there's nothing quite like exposing an exchange of cold, hard cash from one greedy fist to another to focus one's attention on the business at hand.

And when that dirty business is the subversion of the American people's right to privacy, there's also nothing quite like economic self-interest for ensuring that a cone of silence descends over matters best left to the experts; a veritable army of specialists squeezing singular advantage out of any circumstance, regardless of how dire the implications for our democracy.

In light of this recommendation researcher Christopher Soghoian, deploying the tools of statistical analysis and a keen sense of outrage, reaffirmed that "Internet service providers and telecommunications companies play a significant, yet little known role in law enforcement and intelligence gathering."

That the American people have been kept in the dark when it comes to this and other affairs of state, remain among the most closely-guarded open secrets of what has euphemistically been called the "NSA spying scandal."

And when the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) posted thousands of pages of documents "detailing behind-the-scenes negotiations between government agencies and Congress about providing immunity for telecoms involved in illegal government surveillance" last month, they lifted the lid on what should be a major scandal, not that corporate media paid the least attention.

A lid that Obama's "change" regime hopes to slam back down as expeditiously as possible.

Hoping to forestall public suspicions of how things actually work in Washington, the administration has declared that "it will continue to block the release of additional documents, including communications within the Executive Branch and records reflecting the identities of telecoms involved in lobbying for immunity," according to EFF's Senior Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl.

No small matter, considering that should a court ever find avaricious telecoms and ISPs liable for violating the rights of their customers, fines could mount into the billions. Even in today's climate of corporate bailouts and "too big to fail" cash gifts to executive suite fraudsters, damages, both in monetary terms and adverse publicity, would hardly be chump change.

Hence, last year's mad scramble for the retroactive immunity avidly sought by these grifters and granted by congressional con men on both sides of the aisle when they passed the despicable FISA Amendments Act, hastily signed into law by our former "war president."

Without belaboring the point that corporate media largely failed to expose the extent of the dirty deals struck amongst these scofflaws, Soghoian, a graduate student no less, stepped into the breech and filled some necessary gaps in the surveillance story.

Believing, naïvely perhaps, that numbers don't lie and that laying out the facts might just wake us from our deadly slumber, Soghoian writes: "If you were to believe the public surveillance statistics, you might come away with the idea that government surveillance is exceedingly rare in the United States."

Indeed, "the vast majority of ... [court] intercept orders are for phone wiretaps. Thus, for example, of the 1891 intercept orders granted in 2008, all but 134 of them were issued for phone taps."

Which begs the question: "How often are Internet communications being monitored, and what kind of orders are required in order to do so."

Unsurprisingly, the threshold for obtaining personal records is exceedingly low and "very few of these methods require an intercept order."

All the government need do to obtain a pen register or trap and trace order, which examine to/from/subject lines of email messages, URLs of viewed web pages, search terms, telephone numbers dialed and the like, is to unilaterally declare that information obtained via this backdoor route is "relevant" to an ongoing criminal or counterterrorist investigation.

In other words, give us everything we want and move along!

The nation's telecoms and ISPs have been very accommodating in this regard. And, as with other recent historical examples that come to mind such as the rush by U.S. firms to "rebuild" Iraq, Afghanistan and other benighted nations "liberated" by that "shining city upon a hill" that bombs, maims and generally does what it pleases because it can, servicing the secret state's limitless appetite for "actionable intelligence" has proven to be a very lucrative cash cow indeed.

Open a Can of Worms and Blood-Sucking Night Crawlers Slither Out

Deciding to "follow the money," Soghoian hoped "to determine how often Internet firms were disclosing their customers' private information to the government." As often as possible as it turns out. Describing the nexus between Sprint Nextel and the secret state, Soghoian discloses:

Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers' (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.

The evidence documenting this surveillance program comes in the form of an audio recording of Sprint's Manager of Electronic Surveillance, who described it during a panel discussion at a wiretapping and interception industry conference, held in Washington DC in October of 2009.

It is unclear if Federal law enforcement agencies' extensive collection of geolocation data should have been disclosed to Congress pursuant to a 1999 law that requires the publication of certain surveillance statistics--since the Department of Justice simply ignores the law, and has not provided the legally mandated reports to Congress since 2004. (Christopher Soghoian, "8 Million Reasons for Real Surveillance Oversight," Slight Paranoia, December 1, 2009)

A web portal I might add, equipped with a built-in price list ready-made for charging securocrats who spy on our blog posts, emails, web searches, mobile phone pings; indeed, any data the government might deem worthy of an "investigation." Call it a PayPal for spooks; now how's that for convenience!

How did Soghoian dig up the facts on the firm's lucrative arrangement with the government? In October, he attended the ISS World 2009 conference, Intelligence Support Systems for Lawful Interception, Criminal Investigations and Intelligence Gathering (ISS), described by Wired as "a surveillance industry gathering for law enforcement and intelligence agencies and the companies that provide them with the technologies and capabilities to conduct surveillance."

Closed to the media and the public, the enterprising researcher obtained entry as a graduate student and recorded several sessions, since taken down at the insistence of ISS's corporate master TeleStrategies, who hosted the conference.

Describing itself as "the leading producer of telecommunications conference events in the United States," the firm claimed that Soghoian's recordings "violated copyright law." But not having deep pockets to weather a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown fight, he removed the files from his blog.

Inquiring minds can't help but wonder what was so threatening to the corporatist apple cart that they threatened to bring their thumb down, on a student no less? Let's take a look!

Among the sponsors of this year's ISS confab, one finds the usual low-key suspects manning the exhibits, hawking their wares and delivering learned presentations to their "partners" in the intelligence and security "community."

Leading the pack is ETI Group, self-described as "a leading management consulting firm specializing in Process Management and Improvement." As a "leading provider" of so-called "lawful interception solutions" for security agencies, telecoms and ISPs, ETI Group provide "future proof and scalable platforms" for the acquisition of information from "multiple sources."

NICE Systems, another "leading provider" of what it calls "Insight from Interactions solutions" derived from the "the convergence of advanced analytics of unstructured multimedia content and transactional data--from telephony, web, email, radio, video and other data sources." Partners in the "Security Sector" include, among others, Raytheon, Honeywell, Siemens, Lockheed Martin, HP, Tyco and Motorola, all of whom are heavy-hitters in the Military-Industrial-Intelligence Complex and niche players in the burgeoning electronic surveillance industry in their own right.

Next up is SAP, a firm whose Government Support & Services division provide "a comprehensive range" of "enterprise software applications" to "help the analysts of the Intelligence Community" obtain "timely, accurate, objective and relevant intelligence." One can only wonder whether Doug Feith's shop over at the Pentagon deployed SAP "solutions" to find Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction" during the run-up to the Iraq invasion!

Taking their turn on the dais is Spectronic Systems, a Danish firm that is "100% privately owned." Little however, could be gleaned from a perusal of their web site since the company kindly informs us that it "is strictly for the benefit of Government Agencies, Law Enforcement Agencies, Intelligence Agencies and Government Approved companies." However, ISS World was good enough to disclose that Spectronic activities include "the development and manufacturing of monitoring systems and monitoring centres" for telephone, internet, fax and modem traffic. Their systems are designed to "handle--i.e. retrieve, collect, decode, store and present--bulk data," that can double as "data retention systems" for "bulk monitoring of SMS, MMS, e-mails or other means of data communication." But how beneficial is it to the bottom line? Alas, a diligent search of the business press by this writer hit a veritable blank wall.

SS8 on the other hand is more forthcoming, claiming that their "products" allow intelligence agencies to "visualize and analyze a target's internet session" and to "recognize, monitor, investigate and prevent criminal activity." Proud that they have a "global reach," SS8 broadcasts that their "electronic surveillance solutions" are "deployed in over 25 countries" and that their data installations "can intercept more than 100 million subscribers." The firm's platform for internet, WiFi, broadband and satellite interception claims to be capable of ferreting out "hidden relationships" while identifying "trends" (code for data mining and social network analysis) that "meet the functional needs" of the secret state.

Telesoft Technologies, produce "monitoring probes" that "allow data extraction" from "cellular and fixed networks." This can be done for "fixed, 2/3G mobile and packet networks." According to the firm, their "universal passive probes extract call content, signalling [sic] and location information for use by monitoring applications," ensuring a seamless connection" of applications to "real world systems."

True Position; this firm's national security brief involves the identification and tracking of any mobile device in "real time" and offer "insightful intelligence" while "delivering powerful solutions" that "enable private enterprises and government agencies" the capability "to protect people, combat crime, and save lives like never before." According to the company's web site, the firm deploys data mining technologies that "monitor activity and behavior over time in order to build detailed profiles and identify others that they associate with."

Last, but certainly not least, is the ultra-spooky Israeli firm, Verint (formerly Comverse Infosys). Billing itself as the world leader in "actionable intelligence," readers are well-advised to peruse the documents on Verint products such as Reliant and Star Gate generously posted by our good friends over at the whistleblowing web site Quintessenz. And while your at it, why not check out AFC's piece, "Thick as Thieves: The Private (and very profitable) World of Corporate Spying," where information on the shady activities of the firm's founder, Kobi Alexander, can be found. Currently holed-up in Windhoek, Namibia after becoming the recipient of a 2006 thirty-two count indictment by the Justice Department that charged the ex-Israeli intelligence officer and entrepreneur with backdating millions of stock options worth $138 million, Alexander is a sterling representative of an industry dedicated to "lawful interception" of our electronic communications to "prevent criminal activity."

Amongst the exhibitors at ISS World, one finds (yet another) spooky Israeli firm Narus, whose hardware was a permanent "guest" in ATT/NSA "secret rooms" scattered around the country for surveillance of the entire Internet. First disclosed by ATT whistleblower Mark Klein in his sworn affidavit on behalf of EFF's lawsuit, Hepting v. ATT, the firm's STA 6400 traffic analyzer can monitor traffic equal to 39,000 DSL lines at 10 Gbit/s, or in practical terms, a single Narus machine can surveil several million broadband users at any given time. In 2004, the former Deputy Director of NSA, William Crowell joined the firm's board of directors. As a result of FAA's retroactive immunity provision, Hepting v. ATT was dismissed in 2009.

Which brings us full-circle to Sprint Nextel's spiffy new web portal that enables the secret state to "ping" their customers' GPS locations eight million times in the space of a year.

Tip of the Proverbial Iceberg

Hoping to learn more, Soghoian filed multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the Department of Justice, seeking relevant details on just how much these corporate grifters charge our silent guardians for their electronic spying.

It was at that point that Soghoian ran into a brick wall. When he uncovered evidence that the illicit surveillance compact amongst federal security agencies, telecoms and ISPs was a limitless gold mine enriching shareholders at the expense of our constitutional rights, the firms struck back.

"Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that, among other things, they would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public," Wired reported December 1.

What do these firms have to hide? Apparently, quite a lot.

Yahoo and Verizon weren't about to release the data and filed a 12-page objection letter with the Justice Department, claiming that if their pricing information were disclosed to Soghoian he would use it for nefarious ends "to 'shame' Yahoo and other companies--and to 'shock' their customers."

Cryptome Delivers the Goods, Again

Despite their whining, the indefatigable John Young, webmaster of the intelligence and security whistleblowing web site Cryptome, has published the Yahoo! Compliance Guide for Law Enforcement.

The 17-page handy guide for spooks and cops provides information on what the firm can and will provide the secret state (everything) and what it will cost.

Cryptome, never a site to run from a fight, has also posted the compliance guides of AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Voicestream, Cox, Cingular, SBC, and Pacific Telesis.

As Antifascist Calling has averred many times, since the business of America's security is, after all, business, let's just say the "service" Yahoo provides our nation's spooks doesn't come cheap.

For his sterling efforts to inform the public, Young has been threatened by Yahoo attorneys with the tony Washington law firm Steptoe & Johnson.

In a series of communications with Young, Yahoo's lawyers are threatening legal action in the form of a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice, claiming that "the unauthorized use and distribution of this document ... infringes Yahoo's intellectual property rights and constitutes a violation of U.S. copyright law."

Attorney Michael T. Gershberg's tersely worded missive, alleges that the posted spy guide "also infringes Yahoo's trade secrets and constitutes business interference."

Young fired back December 2: "The Yahoo document hosted on Cryptome was found on the Internet at a publicly accessible site.

"There is no copyright notice on the document. Would you please provide substantiation that the document is copyrighted or otherwise protected by DMCA? Your letter does not provide more than assertion without evidence."

Gershberg countered: "On behalf of our client, Yahoo! Inc., attached please find a notice of copyright infringement pursuant to Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Thank you for your cooperation in this matter."

Undeterred, Young shot back: "I cannot find at the Copyright Office a grant of copyright for the Yahoo spying document hosted on Cryptome. To assure readers Yahoo's copyright claim is valid and not another hoary bluff without substantiation so common under DMCA bombast please send a copy of the copyright grant for publication on Cryptome."

Continuing, Young wrote: "Until Yahoo provides proof of copyright, the document will remain available to the public for it provides information that is in the public interest about Yahoo's contradictory privacy policy and should remain a topic of public debate on ISP unacknowledged spying complicity with officials for lucrative fees."

According to Cryptome, "The information in the document which counters Yahoo's customer privacy policy suggests a clearing of the air is in order to assure customer reliance on Yahoo's published promises of trust. A rewrite of Yahoo's spying guide to replace the villainous one would be a positive step, advice of an unpaid, non-lawyerly independent panel could be sought to avoid the stigma associated with DMCA coercion.

"Note: Yahoo's exclamation point is surely trademarked so omitted here."

Commenting on the spy guide, Wired reported,

The Compliance Guide reveals, for example, that Yahoo does not retain a copy of e-mails that an account holder sends unless that customer sets up the account to store those e-mails. Yahoo also cannot search for or produce deleted e-mails once they've been removed from a user's trash file.

The guide also reveals that the company retains the IP addresses from which a user logs in for just one year. But the company's logs of IP addresses used to register new accounts for the first time go back to 1999. The contents of accounts on Flickr, which Yahoo also owns, are purged as soon as a user deactivates the account.

Chats conducted through the company's Web Messenger service may be saved on Yahoo's server if one of the parties in the correspondence set up their account to archive chats. This pertains to the web-based version of the chat service, however. Yahoo does not have the content of chats for consumers who use the downloadable Web Messenger client on their computer.

Instant message logs are retained 45 to 60 days and includes an account holder's friends list, and the date and times the user communicated with them. (Kim Zetter, "Yahoo Issues Takedown Notice for Spying Price List," Wired, December 4, 2009)

Well, just how much does Yahoo charge for their dubious shenanigans with the secret state? Wired reports: "According to this list, Yahoo charges the government about $30 to $40 for the contents, including e-mail, of a subscriber's account. It charges $40 to $80 for the contents of a Yahoo group."

Do the math for millions of customers whose rights have been abused and violated and pretty soon we're talking serious money!

Is this what Yahoo and Verizon mean when they claim that should their surveillance price lists be publicly disclosed to they would be used "to 'shame' Yahoo! and other companies--and to 'shock' their customers."

"Therefore," the company avers, "release of Yahoo's information is reasonably likely to lead to impairment of its reputation for protection of user privacy and security, which is a competitive disadvantage for technology companies."

Well guess what, guilty as charged! Now that the information has been widely posted and mirrored by the global whistleblowers Wikileaks and countless other web sites, we should consider the alarming implications of Christopher Soghoian's essential research to our privacy and democratic rights and act accordingly.

Barring a mechanism that guarantees public accountability from the secret state and their grifting corporate partners, we are left with no alternative but to name and shame. After all, democracy is not a spectator sport!

Tom Burghardt is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Global Research Articles by Tom Burghardt

Our Spy Capabilities Would ‘Shock’, ‘Confuse’ Consumers

Yahoo & Verizon

• By Kim Zetter
• December 1, 2009 |
• 3:30 pm |
• Categories: Cover-Ups, Surveillance, privacy

Courtesy Of Wired Online Magazine

Want to know how much phone companies and internet service providers charge to funnel your private communications or records to U.S. law enforcement and spy agencies?

That’s the question muckraker and Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian asked all agencies within the Department of Justice, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed a few months ago. But before the agencies could provide the data, Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that, among other things, they would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public.

Yahoo writes in its 12-page objection letter (.pdf), that if its pricing information were disclosed to Soghoian, he would use it “to ’shame’ Yahoo! and other companies — and to ’shock’ their customers.”

“Therefore, release of Yahoo!’s information is reasonably likely to lead to impairment of its reputation for protection of user privacy and security, which is a competitive disadvantage for technology companies,” the company writes.

Verizon took a different stance. It objected to the release (.pdf) of its Law Enforcement Legal Compliance Guide because it might “confuse” customers and lead them to think that records and surveillance capabilities available only to law enforcement would be available to them as well — resulting in a flood of customer calls to the company asking for trap and trace orders.

“Customers may see a listing of records, information or assistance that is available only to law enforcement,” Verizon writes in its letter, “but call in to Verizon and seek those same services. Such calls would stretch limited resources, especially those that are reserved only for law enforcement emergencies.”

Other customers, upon seeing the types of surveillance law enforcement can do, might “become unnecessarily afraid that their lines have been tapped or call Verizon to ask if their lines are tapped (a question we cannot answer).”

Verizon does disclose a little tidbit in its letter, saying that the company receives “tens of thousands” of requests annually for customer records and information from law enforcement agencies.

Soghoian filed his records request to discover how much law enforcement agencies — and thus U.S. taxpayers — are paying for spy documents and surveillance services with the aim of trying to deduce from this how often such requests are being made. Soghoian explained his theory on his blog, Slight Paranoia:

In the summer of 2009, I decided to try and follow the money trail in order to determine how often Internet firms were disclosing their customers’ private information to the government. I theorized that if I could obtain the price lists of each ISP, detailing the price for each kind of service, and invoices paid by the various parts of the Federal government, then I might be able to reverse engineer some approximate statistics. In order to obtain these documents, I filed Freedom of Information Act requests with every part of the Department of Justice that I could think of.

The first DoJ agency to respond to his request was the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS), which indicated that it had price lists available for Cox Communications, Comcast, Yahoo and Verizon. But because the companies voluntarily provided the price lists to the government, the FOIA allows the companies an opportunity to object to the disclosure of their data under various exemptions. Comcast and Cox were fine with the disclosure, Soghoian reported.

He found that Cox Communications charges $2,500 to fulfill a pen register/trap-and-trace order for 60 days, and $2,000 for each additional 60-day-interval. It charges $3,500 for the first 30 days of a wiretap, and $2,500 for each additional 30 days. Thirty days worth of a customer’s call detail records costs $40.

Comcast’s pricing list, which was already leaked to the internet in 2007, indicated that it charges at least $1,000 for the first month of a wiretap, and $750 per month thereafter.

But Verizon and Yahoo took offense at the request.

Yahoo objected on grounds that its pricing constituted “confidential commercial information” and cited Exemption 4 of the Freedom of Information Act and the Trade Secrets Act.

Exemption 4 of the FOIA refers to the disclosure of commercial or financial information that could result in a competitive disadvantage to the company if it were publicly disclosed. The company claims its pricing is derived from labor rates for employees and overhead and, therefore, disclosing the information would provide clues to its operating costs — regardless of whether these same clues are already available in public records, such as those the company files with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company also claims that since Soghoian is trying to determine the actual amounts the Marshals Service paid Yahoo for responding to requests, the price lists are irrelevant, since “there are no standard prices for these transactions.”

But equally important to Yahoo’s objections was the potential for “criticism” and ridicule. Yahoo quoted Soghoian on his blog writing that his aim was to “use this blog to shame the corporations that continue to do harm to user online privacy.”

Yahoo also objected to the disclosure of its letter objecting to the disclosure of pricing information saying that “release of this letter would likely cause substantial competitive harm” to the company. The company added, in a veiled threat, that if the Marshals Service were to show anyone its letter objecting to the disclosure of pricing information, it could “impair the government’s ability to obtain information necessary for making appropriate decisions with regard to future FOIA requests.”

If anyone out there has a copy of Verizon or Yahoo’s law enforcement pricing list and wants to share it, feel free to use our anonymous tip address.