What was the whistleblower’s path to coming forward?
Babak Pasdar fled the 1979 revolution in Iran with his parents and two brothers. After arriving in the United States on a tourist visa, their request for political asylum was denied, but the family eventually established themselves in their new country.
In 2003, Pasdar was approached by networking and cybersecurity corporation Juniper Networks to re-architect the tech infrastructure at a major wireless carrier, later revealed to be Verizon. Over the course of this project, Pasdar discovered a circuit, later dubbed “The Quantico Circuit,” that gave a US government office in Quantico, Virginia, unfettered access to customer calls, data, and physical movements.
In January 2006, Pasdar testified to several congressional committees and the Senate Judiciary Committee, which led to a $233 billion class-action lawsuit against Verizon. During this time, Pasdar did not speak with any major media outlets. In the spring of 2008, however, he wrote a seven-page affidavit for the Government Accountability Project (GAP) describing what he knew about the carrier’s surveillance practices and how he had uncovered them. Soon after, he gave interviews to Democracy Now and WIRED, despite being under a nondisclosure agreement; in these interviews, he did not identify Verizon by name.
What were their motivations?
Pasdar told Democracy Now in 2008 that his focus was “to have an investigation and find out exactly what the purpose and function of this circuit is, who paid for it, who operates it, and what kind of information is collected.” Additionally, according to WIRED, Pasdar’s GAP affidavit was circulated among congressional staffers deliberating on a Republican proposal to grant legal immunity to telecom companies who participated in wiretapping.
Years later, in a 2014 interview for the Brennan Center for Justice, Pasdar said, “It’s a lot easier for the government to create new systems than it is for us to go back and try to take back Constitutional powers. . . . We have to make sure we enforce what is constitutionally appropriate, and not let technology get ahead of the Constitution.”
What was the initial reaction to their story?
Pasdar claims his co-workers at Verizon were “very squirrelly” about his inquiry into the third-party circuit, and that the director of security came to his office after hours, threatening to fire him if he could not “forget about it.” However, he said he was willing to accept personal and professional risk to avoid setting a precedent of complacency regarding government surveillance.
Pasdar’s testimony and affidavit influenced the publication of a 2008 “Dear Colleague” letter, signed by Congress members John Dingell, Ed Markey, and Bart Stupak, urging lawmakers to not “vote in the dark” regarding telecoms’ immunity from lawsuits when “profound privacy and security risks” are involved.
How did those being exposed react?
The Electronic Frontier Foundation claims that, in reaction to the $233 billion lawsuit, telecom giants waged an “elaborate” lobbying campaign to drum up support for legislation that would grant them amnesty for violating federal privacy laws by wiretapping without a warrant.
In July 2008, the Senate approved an update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) granting this immunity on the condition that the telecom companies show district court documents proving they were instructed by the government to eavesdrop. Some attribute the approval of this measure to the Bush administration’s practice of directing phone companies to surveil private conversations after 9/11.
How did public opinion change?
In his 2014 interview with the Brennan Center for Justice, Pasdar argued that his revelations about telecommunications corporations, and others about the National Security Administration (NSA), caused a “huge transition to the cloud” and a “chilling effect on technology in the US.” Pasdar also predicted that this shift away from US infrastructure and toward the cloud as a result of the NSA’s troubling history would have a negative impact on the US economy; this phenomenon has picked up some coverage in years since.
Where is the whistleblower now?
Pasdar is now the founder and CEO of Acreto, a company that provides advanced security for distributed and mobile technology platforms. He has been credited as one of the leading innovators of cloud-delivered security, and was named one of New York’s Top Ten Startup founders in 2017.
