ARTS & FARCES internet

Joseph Nacchio, former chief executive of Qwest, was convicted in April of this year of 19 counts of insider trading. Before that he had become the butt of the then-nascent blogosphere. During an interview at the March 2002 PC Forum, Nacchio was poor-mouthing the challenges facing the tough telecommunications market. An off-site observer sent Doc Searls and Dan Gillmor back-channel links to Nacchio’s earlier stock sales—the same sales he was convicted on—indicating he was taking millions out of the company just before the company’s stock began to fall. Searls and Gillmor blogged about it in real-time, creating a conference within the conference. Many of the attendees had laptops and were monitoring the flow of the blogosphere and turned hostile toward Nacchio.

Now, according to Ellen Nakashima and Dan Eggen’s report in the Washington Post, Nacchio “has alleged that the government withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after Qwest refused to participate in an unidentified National Security Agency [NSA] program that the company thought might be illegal.”

According to court documents that were unsealed this week, the NSA “approached Qwest more than six months before the September 11, 2001 attacks.” Nacchio’s lawyer maintains that the NSA had approached the company about helping with a warrantless wiretapping program focusing on American citizens’ phone records. The September 11 attacks have been consistently cited by the Bush administration as the main driver of its warrantless wiretapping program, but the conversation with Nacchio is alleged to have occurred well before the attacks.

The issue of immunity for the telecommunications companies that helped (conspired with?) the Bush administration carry out its warrantless wiretapping program is currently under review in the US Congress and one telecom player, AT&T, has been sued by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for its participation in the administration’s warrentless wiretapping program.