US Internet Company Refused To Participate In NSA Surveillance, Documents Reveal (zdnet.com)

Zack Whittaker reports via ZDNet: A U.S. company refused to comply with a top-secret order that compelled it to facilitate government surveillance, according to newly declassified documents. According to the document, the unnamed company's refusal to participate in the surveillance program was tied to an apparent expansion of the foreign surveillance law, details of which were redacted by the government prior to its release, as it likely remains classified. It's thought to be only the second instance of an American company refusing to comply with a government surveillance order. The first was Yahoo in 2008. It was threatened with hefty daily fines if it didn't hand over customer data to the National Security Agency. The law is widely known in national security circles as forming the legal basis authorizing the so-called PRISM surveillance program, which reportedly taps data from nine tech titans including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and others. It also permits "upstream" collection from the internet fiber backbones of the internet. Any guesses as to which company it may be? The company was not named in the 2014-dated document, but it's thought to be an internet provider or a tech company.

Comments

I know the company

[110010001000]

MySpace. And you know what happened to them!

refused to participate

[fustakrakich]

That would be a neat trick... Can we 'refuse' too?

Re:refused to participate

[scdeimos]

I know people around here have reading problems, so from TFA...

But despite the company's efforts to argue that the surveillance order was unlawful, the company was later forced to comply by the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance] court.

Re:refused to participate

[fustakrakich]

A mere formality. They 'complied' without even knowing what was happening.

limited possibilities

[muphin]

There are only a few large companies out there that could refuse and make it more difficult for the government.
Giving the history with Apple refusing the decrypt data I would go with them, NSA probably wanted to tap into the iMessaging service.

Re:limited possibilities

[davide marney]

Sounds like maybe Cox Internet. They don't take kindly to their customers being abused. For example, they had refused to buckle under to Rightscorp, the copyright shakedown firm, and blocked their notices for years. As Cox explained in their suit (which they lost):

"Rightscorp and Plaintiffs tried to abuse Cox’s system," Cox told the judge. "Rightscorp sells shady services to copyright holders. It shakes down ISP customers for money without regard to actual liability, and it tries to enlist ISPs in its scheme. Cox explained it would not accept Rightscorp’s wrongful notices and asked Rightscorp to fix its notices. Rightscorp refused, instead dumping thousands of notices per day on Cox. As a result, Cox blocked Rightscorp’s notices. This suit is Rightscorp’s retribution, with Plaintiffs’ complicity, for Cox’s refusal to participate in Rightscorp’s scheme."

Re:limited possibilities

[rtb61]

A large company with good lawyers who were not interested in the corrupt money and contracts being provided, who knew full well that those utterly bullshit secret laws would fail in the high court no matter how corrupt those judges are because approving those corrupt laws would disrupt the US legal system and would have to be struck down.

The surveillance had nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with extreme political ideological corruption in the deep state (well all to shallow partnership in crime between corrupt corporations and corrupt elected officials and the corrupt political appointees they corruptly placed into the system). The sole purpose attack and silence political activism and any threat to the extremely profitable corruption, even though that corruption is destroying the US at every level, from overseas relations and trade to infrastructure collapse to collapsing education system to abusive law enforcers and prisons to a for profit military, all preying upon US society to it's ultimate collapse and they do not care as long as they are rich and can evacuate to another country with the money they fraudulently gain.

Re:limited possibilities

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

When I got a notice from Cox for my "business-level connection" they specifically wrote that as this was a business service I was allowed per my contract to share out my signal via unauthenticated wifi and they therefor assumed that was how the infringement happened. At that point, I tweaked utorrent to only share back up to 120% and then stop seeding, and never got another notification. So yes, they do really put their customer first in this.

Re:limited possibilities

[buss_error]

as an example AT&T has been bent over for decades.

Good reason for it. See the federal budget and notice how much money AT&T gets for bending over.

Re:limited possibilities

[Rakarra]

Uber made its own bed. Saying this is just the CIA planting nonsense is like saying Bill and Hillary were taken down by the vast right-wing conspiracy or Donald Trump's current woes are because he wants to shake up the intelligence community, etcetc. People who do wrong are very good at deflecting the blame of their personal failings to someone else instead of admitting culpability, Uber doesn't need your help to do that.

Lavabit

[wherrera]

Lavabit, assuming the calendar years fit the redacted docs.

I bet it was Qwest

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably Qwest. That was covered extensively here back in the day. Their CEO was jailed for "insider trading" because the government didn't pay its contracts as leverage and it tanked the company.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwest

Re:I bet it was Qwest

[Anubis IV]

It isn't Qwest. These documents are from 2014. Qwest was bought out and rebranded in 2011. The NSA stuff they're known for was from the early 2000s.

Seconded

[ArchieBunker]

Just going to say Qwest. If you don't play ball with Uncle Sam then business suddenly becomes more difficult.

Could it be

[kilodelta]

Cox Communications? I know they've not been too friendly to the feds.

Redacted laws

[Anonymous Coward]

Redacted laws...
Are you proud to be an American?

*Somebody* has ethics

[T.E.D.]

My favorite part of this story is that, due to all the secrecy involved, this company can get no kudos for refusing to facilitate spying, almost certainly knew that, and yet they did it anyway.

“The true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is watching.” John Wooden

Qwest and Joseph Nacchio

[eastjesus]

Former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, after threats from the NSA that his refusal to cooperate may jeopardize future government contracts, alleged in appeal documents that the NSA requested that Qwest participate in its wiretapping program in February of 2001, more than six months before September 11, 2001. He was the only head of a communications company to demand a court order, or approval under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, in order to turn over communications records to the NSA. The NSA cancelled a lucrative contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars with Qwest as a result of Qwest's refusal to participate in the wiretapping program. Nacchio and six other former Qwest executives were sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accusing them of a $3 billion financial fraud between 1999 and 2002 and of benefiting from an inflated stock price, a price based on the NSA contracts in place at the time. His defense was ruled not admissible in court because the U.S. Department of Justice filed an "in limine" motion to exclude information which may reveal state secrets. Information from the Classified Information Procedures Act hearings in Mr. DiNaccio's case was likewise ruled inadmissible. Nacchio was convicted on 19 of 42 counts of insider trading and sentenced to six years in federal prison and ordered to pay a $19 million fine and forfeit $52 million he gained in stock sales. Nacchio surrendered April 14, 2009 to a federal prison camp in Schuylkill, Pennsylvania to begin serving a six-year sentence. The United States Supreme Court denied bail pending appeal the same day. Nacchio finished serving his sentence on September 20, 2013.