Aug. 24, 2007 (LPAC)--The Director of National Intelligence has become the first Administration official to confirm that telecommunications companies were providing data to the National Security Agency as part of the Cheney-run NSA domestic surveillance program.

In an interview in El Paso Times published on August 22, DNI Mike McConnell, who was previously the NSA director, acknowledged that under the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program, "the private sector had assisted us." And he pointed that the Administration wanted to get immunity for the private sector companies, otherwise they could be bankrupted by lawsuits.

McConnell also admits that the Administration didn't want the new FISA bill limited to terrorism, but they wanted it to include all "foreign intelligence" -- which the bill passed by Congress on August 4 did. While McConnell denies that he was pressured by the White House to back out of a previous agreement he had with the Senate leadership (a number of reports indicated that it was Cheney who forced him to back out), McConnell does acknowledged that right before he backed out of what people thought was an agreement, he was handed a copy of the rewritten bill from the Vice President's office in the Capitol.

Up to this point, the Administration has refused to acknowledge the role of the private telecommunications companies and it has asserted that any such information is a "state secret." In a number of cases, the Justice Department has succeeding in having civil suits against the NSA and the phone companies thrown out of court claiming that they can't be tried without disclosing state secrets -- which McConnell himself has now disclosed.

Today's New York Times cites an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the plaintiffs in the San Francisco suit against AT&T and the NSA, saying they are likely to bring McConnell's admissions to the attention of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which just heard arguments in the appeal on two such lawsuits.