The FISA court has said that since none of the telcos have ever challenged the collections orders, and that they are the only ones with standing to challenge these orders.

I guess that it might have something to do with the fact that the only time that a phone company resisted their demands, the government retaliated against them and threw their CEO in jail.

So, no harm, no foul, I guess:

No telecommunications company has ever challenged the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court’s orders for bulk phone records under the Patriot Act, the court revealed on Tuesday.

The secretive Fisa court’s disclosure came inside a declassification of its legal reasoning justifying the National Security Agency’s ongoing bulk collection of Americans’ phone records.

Citing the “unprecedented disclosures” and the “ongoing public interest in this program”, Judge Claire V Eagan on 29 August not only approved the Obama administration’s request for the bulk collection of data from an unidentified telecommunications firm, but ordered it declassified. Eagan wrote that despite the “lower threshold” for government bulk surveillance under Section 215 of the Patriot Act compared to other laws, the telephone companies who have received Fisa court orders for mass customer data have not challenged the law.

“To date, no holder of records who has received an Order to produce bulk telephony metadata has challenged the legality of such an Order,” Eagan wrote. “Indeed, no recipient of any Section 215 Order has challenged the legality of such an order, despite the mechanism for doing so.”

That complicity has not been total. Before the Bush administration moved the bulk phone records collection under the authority of the Fisa court, around 2006, Qwest Communications refused to participate in the effort.

If you know what happened to Qwest, and you might understand why the telcos have never challenged the order.

Qwest lost numerous government contracts after refusing to collaborate in the Bush administration’s illegal data collection, and missed its numbers, which caused the stock to tank, and then they went after the CEO, Joe Nacchio. who was then prosecuted for insider trading on the basis of his rosy projections for the company.

See Nacchio’s allegations here: (from 2007)

Nacchio was convicted for selling shares of Qwest stock in early 2001, just before financial problems caused the company’s share price to tumble. He has claimed in court papers that he had been optimistic that Qwest would overcome weak sales because of the expected top-secret contract with the government. Nacchio said he was forbidden to mention the specifics during the trial because of secrecy restrictions, but the judge ruled that the issue was irrelevant to the charges against him.

Nacchio’s account, which places the NSA proposal at a meeting on Feb. 27, 2001, suggests that the Bush administration was seeking to enlist telecommunications firms in programs without court oversight before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The Sept. 11 attacks have been cited by the government as the main impetus for its warrantless surveillance efforts.

They sent him to jail for 6 years. (He actually is coming out after a bit less than 5)

Is there any wonder that none of the telcos have challenged such an order?

Even if they don’t send you to jail, supplying secure connectivity to government agencies is a particularly lucrative part of the business, and if they took the NSA to court, it would all end, and they would lose their, “Phoney Baloney Jobs,” to quote Mel Brooks.

Harrumph, indeed.