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There’s been much ado about warrantless wiretapping lately. The Protect America Act, which granted immunity to telecommunications companies aiding the government with their warrantless wiretaps, expired in mid-February, and there’s been plenty of time spent on trying to renew that bill. It’s a bit of a slippery situation. The idea behind the act is to more easily catch people plotting against America. However, there is plenty of room for abuse in there. The latest development, though, is that the government not only had/has access to wiretap phones, but it has a “high-speed back door” into a “major wireless carrier’s systems.” So not only can they tap calls, they have access to billing systems and text messaging as well.

“What I thought was alarming is how this carrier ended up essentially allowing a third party outside their organization to have unfettered access to their environment,” Babak Pasdar, now CEO of New York-based Bat Blue told Threat Level. “I wanted to put some access controls around it; they vehemently denied it. And when I wanted to put some logging around it, they denied that.”

All this sounds very similar to a 2006 case against Verizon, so they’re under fire as the culprit here, even though the carrier officially remains anonymous.

“The circuit was tied to the organization’s core network,” Pasdar writes in his affidavit. “It had access to the billing system, text messaging, fraud detection, web site, and pretty much all the systems in the data center without apparent restrictions.”

I’ve been following the warrantless wiretapping issue on other blogs, mostly political in nature. I don’t want to get into specifics now, because this issue has the potential to turn into a flame war in the comments. My entire problem with this issue is that the public will never know what good comes from such a wiretapping program. So we have to take the government’s word for it. Pardon me if I don’t exactly trust our government.

[Threat Level]

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