The Telecom Exec Who Refused to Let the NSA Spy Is Out of Prison, and He's Talking

Former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, who claims the government threw him in prison for refusing to allow the NSA unfettered access to Americans' phone records, is a free man again. He spent four and a half years in prison. And he couldn't have been released into a political climate more amenable to his anti-NSA claims.

As Edward Snowden continues to expose the agency's dragnet surveillance and data collection programs, citizens in the US and the rest of the world are increasingly angry over the government invasion of their privacy, the questionable constitutionality of the snooping, and the lack of any real accountability by the Feds.

Enter Nacchio, who refused to comply with the Bush-era warrantless wiretapping back in 2001 because he believed it was illegal. "I feel vindicated," he told the Wall Street Journal in a post-release interview. "I never broke the law, and I never will."

When the government initiated the legally questionable warrantless wiretapping, Nacchio was serving CEO of Qwest, a major telecommunications company at the time that's since gone bust. His was the only company to resist handing over access to customers' phone records to the NSA without permission from the FISA court.

Later, he was convicted on multiple counts of insider trading while Quest was foundering financially, and thrown in prison. But he remains convinced that the real reason he was charged was for refusing to play nice with the Feds. The way Nacchio's story goes, when he first refused the NSA they threatened to withhold any more government contracts from the company. When he still wouldn't give in, they tried to build a case against him.

Nacchio was never able to tell that part of the story in court, because the documents with the necessary evidence were classified and so refused by the judge. But some of those court documents were released later, in 2007, swaying public opinion to believe the former-CEO's claim that his conviction was politically charged:

"The court has prohibited Mr. Nacchio from eliciting testimony regarding what also occurred at that meeting,” one of the documents states, according to The New York Times. “The court has also refused to allow Mr. Nacchio to demonstrate that the agency retaliated for this refusal by denying the Groundbreaker and perhaps other work to Qwest…"

The Times has more:

In support of Mr. Nacchio’s accusations, his lawyers quoted from one of several lawsuits filed against telecommunications companies, accusing them of violating their customers’ privacy. That lawsuit, filed last year against several companies, asserts that seven months before the Sept. 11 attacks, at about the time of Mr. Nacchio’s meeting at the N.S.A., another phone company, AT&T, “began development of a center for monitoring long distance calls and Internet transmissions and other digital information for the exclusive use of the N.S.A.”

And here's the kicker. The way Nacchio tells it, the government approached him about warrantless wiretapping in February, 2001—six months before the September 11 attacks that George Bush claimed were the reason for the rushed and overreaching surveillance program. "The documents unsealed Wednesday in federal court in Denver … claim for the first time that pressure on the company to participate in activities it saw as improper came as early as February, nearly seven months before the terrorist attacks," the Times reported.

If it's true, it's yet another reason to distrust the government's talking points when it comes to snooping on Americans. It also pokes holes in the go-to justification for the invasive program: that it's all in the name of fighting terrorism.

We haven't heard the last of Nacchio, who became a free man 10 days ago with a new look, two drug offender best friends, Spoonie and Juice, and a bring-it-on attitude. He told the Journal that he plans to start writing a book about Americans' loss of liberty, based on his dealings with the NSA. Something tells me it's not going to paint a pretty picture of the scorned defense agency. Maybe Snowden will write the foreword.

H/T Washington Post