Deuteche Telekom's office have been raided. The German telecommunications giant is listed as NSA-related.

There's been some speculation about the President's role in disseminating propaganda, and manipulating the public to march to an illegal war. The interest in the President's propaganda recently peaked when Scott McClellan accused the President of disseminating (his word) "propaganda" to the public.

Information warfare depends on offensive and defensive operations. One defensive operation is to suppress unfavorable information. If needed, the President could work through intermediaries to identify the source of leaks about the President's illegal activity.

The NSA targets attorneys' communications, but these NSA logs have been suppressed. There's been little public discussion or evidence related to the NSA role in targeting journalists.

Cryptome dismisses any assertion the telecoms are connected with the NSA with:

"Until any of your anonymous contributors can come up with a provable association between an IP range or port range with NSA operations, the entire proposition is obviously a beat-up by, dare I say it, the tin-foil hat brigade."

The German telecommunications' outside firm invoked the same excuse as the President of the United States:

The telecoms giant insists that the Berlin consultancy firm it hired had not listened to journalists' conversations, but only logged details on who phoned whom as well as the time and duration of the calls.

Hewlett Packard hired an outside firm to monitor their corporate communications with journalists. Former DOJ OLC staff counsel worked with H-P to provide a legal defense.

The United States government worked with law enforcement to establish guidelines to conduct electronic surveillance. These requirements are sometimes referred to as CALEA, "Communications for Law Enforcement Act." One CALEA standard requires telecoms to have technical capabilities to permit seamless law enforcement monitoring, to include tracking the duration of the call.

The NSA will have to explain why one of their "NSA related" telecoms is hiring an "outside" firm using methods that substantially match how the President violated FISA.

AT&T has a database code-named Daytona that keeps track of phone numbers on both ends of calls as well as the duration of all land-line calls

DoD guidelines prohibit the illegal use of resources to suppress the free flow of information. Scott McClellan has accused the President of the United States of engaging in illegal propaganda.

Congress must ask McClellan for information he may have showing which White House counsel met with telecom intermediaries or DOJ OLC staff to intimidate journalists. Some of the answers are in the DoD emails. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo knows first hand what DOJ is willing to do to suppress information.