Thanks to Leen at Oxdown Gazette for this charming story.

It's an excerpt of an interview with "Shadow Factory" author James Bamford, on the NSA wiretapping that the 110th Congress was kind enough to retroactively legalize.

Strangely, from the sound of this interview, they forgot to dismiss the fraud cases against the founder and top executives of one of the two companies that handle the wiretapping; the founder is now a fugitive in Namibia.

If you're lucky enough to use Verizon, you get to be wiretapped by a felon.

(Congress made sure that the wiretapping is not a crime; couldn't they have ensured that it was not done by a criminal, by wiping his record clean, as they have wiped the President's?)

Here is the relevant excerpt, and the link.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, Jim Bamford, take this a step further, because you say the founder and former CEO of one of these companies is now a fugitive from the United States somewhere in Africa?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, you know, this is a company that the US government is getting all its tapped information from. It's a company that Verizon uses as its tapping company, its eavesdropping company. And very little is known about these companies. Congress has never looked into any of this. I don't know--I don't think they even know that there is--that these companies exist. But the company that Verizon uses, Verint, the founder of the company, the former head of the company, is now a fugitive in--hiding out in Africa in the country of Namibia, because he's wanted on a number of felony warrants for fraud and other charges. And then, two other top executives of the company, the general counsel and another top official of the parent company, have also pled guilty to these charges.

So, you know, you've got companies--these companies have foreign connections with potential ties to foreign intelligence agencies, and you have problems of credibility, problems of honesty and all that. And these companies--through these two companies pass probably 80 percent or more of all US communications at one point or another. And it's even--gets even worse in the fact that these companies also supply their equipment all around the world to other countries, to countries that don't have a lot of respect for individual rights--Vietnam, China, Libya, other countries like that. And so, these countries use this equipment to filter out dissident communications and people trying to protest the government. It gives them the ability to eavesdrop on communications and monitor dissident email communications. And as a result of that, people are put in jail, and so forth.