Lawyers Accuse Feds of Tapping Phone, Hacking

This news item certainly will heap more suspicion on the Bush administration’s tactics for fighting terrorism.

A law firm in Vermont, which represents a client in Afghanistan and a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, is accusing the federal government of tapping its phones and hacking into a computer used by one of the firm's partners, according to an article posted by the Burlington Free Press. Three partners in the law firm Gensburg, Atwell & Broderick recently sent a letter to clients telling them the firm "can't guarantee their communications were confidential," according to the article. The firm said it had found its phone lines crossed and that a computer forensic examination of the computer used by Robert Gensburg "found an application that disabled all security software and would have given someone access to all information on the computer," according to the article.

Gensberg said there may be an innocent explanation for the problems -- such as he may have accidentally downloaded some malware from the Internet -- but "we are quite confident that it is the United States government that has been doing the phone tapping and computer hacking," the lawyers wrote in their Oct. 2 letter to clients.

According to the article, there's no comment from U.S. officials or Verizon, which operates the phone lines for the law firm and is one of the telecommunication firms named in the Bush administration’s wiretapping program after 9/11:

U.S. Attorney Thomas D. Anderson, the federal government's top law enforcement official in Vermont, said Thursday that he couldn't comment. Verizon has consistently refused to comment on whether it is involved with national security issues, spokeswoman Beth Fastiggi said Thursday.