By now most everyone has heard of NSA’s special collection program, where it intercepts and processes virtually all communications entering and leaving the U.S., ostensibly looking for terrorist activity. Many of you read in the New York Times that the agency is doing massive data mining. That’s all true, but how is the NSA moving all that data around?

The Times reported Saturday that NSA has “tapped into the American telecommunication system’s main arteries.” And indeed they have. That isn’t news. They’ve been doing that for years, the same way they spied on foreign telecommunications systems: by intercepting satellite and microwave links, and occasionally tapping buried cables.

What’s new is that now, with the proliferation of cellular phones and cheap long distance, there’s a whole lot more traffic, and NSA now has to contend with fiber-optic technology, which carries far more traffic, and is much more difficult to tap. The simple taps used in the past on copper wiring just aren’t going to work on fiber-optic cable, which uses light waves encased in long strands of glass to transmit information.

In fact, it’s most likely impossible without inside help. Tapping a fiber-optic line involves installing equipment at a repeater or between repeaters, or AS a repeater. That means AT&T, MCI and Sprint, who carry nearly all international telephone and Internet traffic into or out of the country, would almost certainly have to assist NSA by installing taps for them. The question is, are they?

It wouldn’t be the first time an American company assisted NSA by providing traffic. Western Union provided copies of all telegrams sent into or out of the country to NSA for decades, until the Church Committee began investigating in the 1970s. Operation Shamrock, as it was known, helped convince Congress to pass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is supposed to prohibit eavesdropping on Americans without court order.

And it did, until George W. Bush came along.

Prior to that, if NSA intercepted a conversation that even so much as mentioned an American, it would have to be sanitized, removing all reference to the American, so that nobody using the intelligence report could tell who it was. The final report would refer only to a “U.S. person.” However, the identity could be revealed in some circumstances if the intelligence customer needed to know it to understand the intelligence report.

I don’t really expect anyone who knows the answer to either be reading this or to answer the question, but I strongly suspect that NSA has secretly gained technical assistance from the major telecommunications carriers in intercepting communications.

This could be very embarrassing for the carriers. It could spawn lawsuits. The lawsuits won’t go anywhere, however, as the companies will have a signed agreement with the government protecting them from liability. This is now standard practice when NSA asks a company for this sort of help. But it could get people fired, and cause companies to lose business.