Can that Patriotic Telco Shit, Hatch

When Dodd filibustered the telco immunity bill, Republican douchebags like Jeff Sessions, Mitch McConnell, Jon Kyl and Orrin Hatch whimpered that the telcos were like Colonial Minutemen, rising selflessly to answer the call of a government that needed their help as we pissed our collective pants, blinkered after 9-11,9-11,9-11,9-11.

They all said that the domestic spying they bravely gave Cheney was merely for the love the bald eagle and the Twin Towers or somesuch.

Of course, Cheney started the spying before 9-11, so there’s that… ahem!  But the latest telco outrage is crazier. Well, how do you take your crow, guys? Poached in vomit? Coming right up:

Wiretap Is Cut Off After Feds Fail To Pay Telecom Spying Bills The FBI routinely failed to pay telecom companies promptly for providing phone and internet lines to the FBI’s impressive domestic surveillance architecture — resulting in at least one phone company cutting off a foreign intelligence wiretap until the FBI paid its bill, according to an audit released Thursday. The Justice Department’s Inspector General also found that telecom charges and invoices for surveillance overwhelmed the FBI’s ability to keep track of their bill and that one field office got a $66,000 bill from a carrier for unpaid surveillance work. Former FBI agent and now ACLU national security policy counsel Mike German directed his ire at the telecoms who happily played along with the government’s warrantless spying and let the FBI illegally get customer records following requests to get surveillance today with false promises to pay with a court order tomorrow. . “To put it bluntly it sounds as though the telecoms believe it when FBI says warrant is in the mail but not when they say the check is in the mail,” German said.Each field office has wiretap recording computers that are meshed together with all the other field offices and HQ through a secure fiber optic network operated by Sprint.

The telcos were doing it for the money.  Then, when Republicans (oh so good with the economy and money stuff, ain’t they!) stopped paying the bills, well, shit, the telcos shut down Bush’s spy ring.

Before the power went out, the FBI’s national security wiretapping software, captured 27,728,675 communication sessions, according to released FBI documents, but the documents do not define what a “session” consists of.

{If you want to learn more about FBI’s wiretap network and software, start with “Point, Click … Eavesdrop: How the FBI Wiretap Net Operates” and find out even more — including details on the FBI’s cell phone tracking vans — in “FBI E-Mail Shows Rift Over Warrantless Phone Records Grab.”}