14 DAY TRIAL // The CEO of an Internet Service Provider from Utah has finally opened up over government surveillance installed on its network.
Pete Ashdown, leader of Xmission, says he was faced with such a situation back in 2010, when it received a warrant signed by the Foreign Intelligence Service Court, BuzzFeed reports.
The document mandated that he let the authorities monitor one of his customers through his facility, while also receiving a broad gag order stopping the company from talking about the incident.
Ashdown says court orders are usually passed to the attorneys to figure out if they’re legitimate or not.
“The FISA request was a tricky one, because it was a warrant through the FISA court – whether you believe that is legitimate or not. I have a hard time with secret courts. I ran it past my attorney and asked ‘Is there anyway we can fight this?’ and he said ‘No. It is legitimate,” Ashdown claims.
He also states the warrant was different because it was for monitoring which also involved the installing of some equipment on the network.
Ashdown claims that he didn’t even get to copy the pages of the warrant, only letting him take notes in regards to technical aspects of the things they wanted to do.
The surveillance lasted for about nine months, when the authorities came and took the device away.
“If it were still there, I would have probably smashed it by now. There have been no related arrests that I have heard of,” Xmission CEO states.
Despite coming forth with these details, he says he cannot give more details because of the gag order and that he probably already said too much.
“These programs that violate the Bill of Rights can continue because people can’t go out and say, ‘This is my experience, this is what happened to me, and I don’t think it is right’,” Ashdown says.