Slashdot Mirror
AT&T Forwarding All Internet Traffic to NSA?
An anonymous reader writes "SpamDailyNews is reporting that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a brief that claims AT&T has been forwarding internet traffic directly into the hands of the NSA. The brief was filed under seal (a procedure that allows only the judge and the litigants to view the document) in order to give the court time to review the information. From the article: 'More than just threatening individuals' privacy, AT&T's apparent choice to give the government secret, direct access to millions of ordinary Americans' Internet communications is a threat to the Constitution itself. We are asking the Court to put a stop to it now.'"
And you wonder why the feds have no problem with the AT&T monopoly getting back together? Can we file this under the "You-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-your" department?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
How do they know it?
at what point do you realise that the current administration is out of control , perhaps when soldiers are knocking on your door ?
seems like the enemy is very much within, isn't democracy wonderful
I wonder, how long will it take for our government to realize that most of us take our rights pretty damn seriously, as they are the major reason why so many people like living here? Or, perhaps, we just need to put of a few signs at every protest and rally reading something along the lines of "Please remember to read the god damn Constitution and Bill of Rights before you do anything else."
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
Email, where you surf, and im messages are not considered protected private communications. It is in the same category as a post card. Unlike a letter or phone call there isn't any expectation of privacy on network communications.
Before anyone screams that they should be protected just remember if it was protected then using a network sniffer would become illegal! You can not have it both ways.
If you want private communications then use encryption, the phone, or send a letter.
The person that wrote this was trying to inflame people or doesn't understand what communications are protected and are not.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
When, in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the Causes which impel them to the Separation
church and state is mandated in the U.S. Constitution. Too bad that separation of big business and state wasn't similarly mandated. Why it that the "party of limited government" (the Republicans) is also the party of most intrusive and least ethical government?
First, if they're really doing this, we need full details.
Now, are they talking about forwarding ALL AT&T traffic to NSA? I find that really really hard to believe. How much data is that? Can someone point to some known tech that can handle that....ALL that data? I'm not asking for "secret-I-bet-they-have-cold-fusion-computers" BS tech that someone *thinks* the NSA has.
Second, this is just an accusation. There's one guy that has some documents that say that's what AT&T is doing. For all we know, this guy could be wearing tin-foil hats and singing to his dog about the aliens. He's doing this through the EFF, which to me doesn't lend much to this accusation, considering how they've handled things in the past. They don't exactly have a great track record.
We need details, people, details.
From Wikipedia
The Fourth Amendment guards against searches, arrests, and seizures of property without a specific warrant or a "probable cause" to believe a crime has been committed. A general right to privacy has been inferred from this amendment and others by the Supreme Court...
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
On the policy side, this is an issue of trust and secrecy. This kind of intelligence operation is something you want to be available due to its good uses (and don't want to know about it), but you are afraid of because of the way the government can abuse it. The current administration has greatly reduced my trust in the professionalism of the US intelligence agencies to the point where I'm willing to support this kind of lawsuit.
You know what the irony in this is? We make hideous fun of countries like China where this kind of thing is standard operating procedure, but when we do it, it's supposedly to protect us from the terrorists. How does something like this come about?
I can't repeat this quote enough:
The question burning in my mind is this: How much will it take? How far does the government have to go before everyone says, "Enough!" and finally recognizes the greater danger that we're all in? How badly does our government have to act before people take up the call to arms and start rioting in the streets of this outrageous behavior?
For all the I-have-nothing-to-hiders out there, let me make it clear: I do have things that I'd rather stay hidden, and it's none of your damn business, and none of George W. Bush's damn business, what they are. And whenever a government goober tells me, "Trust me," that's the first sign that I shouldn't. We shouldn't have to blindly trust the government, that's why we friggin' fought England over 200 years ago!
Needless to say, I'm sure as hell glad I don't have AT&T, because it saves me the trouble of cancelling my account and writing a nasty letter about why.
What did you think the NSA was for ?
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Same. The only difference is that China does it openly. Openess is honourable in my book.
People saying they will switch away from AT+T for their DSL or whatever are missing an important point. Because of peering arrangements, your traffic almost certainly goes over AT+T's lines, regardless of who your ISP is.
Using Verizon as your ISP is no defense: if your traffic passes over AT&T owned wire, to or from your destination, you are vulnerable to this kind of snooping. This is particularly true for international traffic, much of which is over fiber-optic cable owned by AT&T. The routers connecting to those cables are one of the best possible places for network monitoring, and you'd better believe that the NSA is happy to install it there, with AT&T cooperation.
There are certainly tools that can track and record every byte sent on every port on a saturated 100 MHz link, and write it to local disk. Given that the trans-atlantic links are rarely GigE capable, a rack of such devices should easily monitor and re-assemble all the traffic desired. www.sandstorm.com, for example, sells exactly that sort of monitoring tool called "Netintercept", commercially. There's no reason to think the NSA doesn't use them or hasn't reverse engineered them.
One wonders where the public will draw the line. Reminds me of the recent Boston Legal monologue from the epsidoe "Stick It" where the lawyer (who gives the following monologue) is defending a woman against tax evasion charges. I find it very apt:
When the weapons of mass destruction thing turned out to be not true, I expected the American people to rise up. Ha! They didn't.
Then, when the Abu Ghraib torture thing surfaced and it was revealed that our government participated in rendition, a practice where we kidnap people and turn them over to regimes who specialize in torture, I was sure then the American people would be heard from. We stood mute.
Then came the news that we jailed thousands of so-called terrorists suspects, locked them up without the right to a trial or even the right to confront their accusers. Certainly, we would never stand for that. We did.
And now, it's been discovered the executive branch has been conducting massive, illegal, domestic surveillance on its own citizens. You and me. And I at least consoled myself that finally, finally the American people will have had enough. Evidentially, we haven't.
In fact, if the people of this country have spoken, the message is we're okay with it all. Torture, warrantless search and seizure, illegal wiretappings, prison without a fair trial - or any trial, war on false pretenses. We, as a citizenry, are apparently not offended.
There are no demonstrations on college campuses. In fact, there's no clear indication that young people seem to notice.
Well, Melissa Hughes noticed. Now, you might think, instead of withholding her taxes, she could have protested the old fashioned way. Made a placard and demonstrated at a Presidential or Vice-Presidential appearance, but we've lost the right to that as well. The Secret Service can now declare free speech zones to contain, control and, in effect, criminalize protest.
Stop for a second and try to fathom that.
At a presidential rally, parade or appearance, if you have on a supportive t-shirt, you can be there. If you are wearing or carrying something in protest, you can be removed.
This, in the United States of America. This in the United States of America. Is Melissa Hughes the only one embarrassed?
I was reading the Puzzle Palace by James Bamford a few weeks ago when I read about Project Shamrock. Coincidentally, it was just after G.W. Bush said they weren't spying on civilians and the country should trust them. The book quotes part of the ruling that ended Project Shamrock. It sounded very familiar to what the President was being accused of. Now with this filing, I'm quite sure the second generation of Project Shamrock happened.
I dont understand when people assume is any privacy at all unless you do it yourself with PGP (or the newly announced digital streaming PGP). Its so easy to evesdrop on anyone else. Plus even easier for the US governement with its largest collection of supercomputers and switches on the planet.
Are you referring to the same congress which sat idle while the Executive branch took a hot carl on FISA, and illegally wiretapped an untold number of telephone calls? The congress which has abdicated its constitutional responsibility, by allowing the Executive to tacitly declare and wage war on a foreign nation? Done nothing of substance to preserve and protect the human rights of persons imprisoned as terrorist suspects or 'enemy combatants'?
Congress is little more than a distraction at this point. The appearance of careful management is truly nothing more than the careful management of appearances - a cliched phrase, which is in fact a cliche due to the fact that it is an oft-repeated basic truth.
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
It surprises you that no one complains about the detention without trial of a few thousand people who are accused of terrorism in a country where no one complained about the dentention of over 100,000 Japanese-Americans who weren't even accused of anything? You obviously have a higher opinion of your fellow citizens than most of them deserve.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Sure, they're scum. Name anyone who ever ran for President and got more than 40% of the vote without betraying America and selling us out so that they could afford the best TV ads.
The real problem is that the federal government has this power to begin with. The fact that they abuse it, is totally uninteresting, because it's so expected. You give a gun to chimps and then wonder why someone got shot. I look at the Constitution, the 10th Amendment, etc, and wonder why the chimp is armed.
If you want an America that doesn't suck, then make it so that it doesn't matter who is president or who gets into Congress, because the positions would wield so little power. And the good news is, the Constitution is already written to support this. We just have to call them on it, and Just Say No every time they try to pass a law based on the justification that something is expedient or efficient or "seems like a good idea."
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Some of the states tried to leave the US once, and they US military occupied and subjugated that territory.
But for different reasons than you say.
I seriously doubt that the vast majority of internet traffic and/or telephone traffic could be stored for later easy access (or at least access at a much later time). You have problems of information overload and quite frankly data storage as well.
The problem is not in the idea that the calls are probably being stored, but that every call is being passively monitored (and temporarily recorded). In essence, everyone must operate under the assumption that every telephone call, every email, and every post to Slashdot is at least passively being passively watched by Big Brother. The potential for chilling effects in areas such as discussing whether the Hamas victory in the PA elections is a good thing is pretty high, what the real meaning of "Jihad" is, etc.
In essence, this creates a widespread, if passive, surveillance structure which creates a chilling effect on legitimate political discussions. If you think it only effects terrorists, you are incredibly mistaken. It effects anyone who takes an interest in Middle-Eastern politics, anyone who wants to have religious discussions online with Muslims, and anyone who is afraid he/she might have had a runin with people who might be watched by even rogue members of the NSA.
This is exactly the danger that the 1st and 4th ammendments were designed to prevent.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I work for the beast -- former AT&T, not SBC -- and am very aware of our network infrastructure and topology. There is absolutely no way this is happenning. I can guarantee it. The EFF is grabbing at publicity straws now, and it's sad to see. I have no love for my employer's recent decisions, (mergers, buyouts, tiered Internet, telephone privacy), but this is an obvious attempt to make the bad guy look even badder. I used to have great respect for the EFF, but this is just sad.
You know... if you're into that sort of thing...
(Of course, using it just proves that you have something to hide... so maybe you'll get in trouble anyway.)
I am the man with no sig!
You think Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower and Carter would really try this stuff? I don't, and I don't think you do either. Yet it's become popular to grouse about how the whole political system sucks, how you don't have any choices, how it doesn't matter who is in office because they're all the same and pretty much leave it at that.
I call bullshit. They're not all the same. Some are definitely, demonstrably better or worse than others. The "Current Administration," in my opinion, will go down in history as THE WORST administration this country has ever had up to the present day - in so many ways and for so many reasons - to what is truly a treasonable extent. Given the outright contempt for the existing laws of the U.S., the spirit in which they were written and the rights of the citizens of the U.S. (to a degree and with an arrogance and seeming malice unequalled in previous U.S. history) demonstrated by this "Current Administration" on an almost daily basis, it is very important to know that it wasn't always this way, and it doesn't need to be this way.
Painting all politicians and political/governmental decisons and activities with the same brush, denouncing one and all as "chimps" or "scum" is muddleheaded thinking that does more to exacerbate the problem than it does to help it. It's a cop out, a blank check to take your toys and go home, rather than expending the effort to find and empower the next Jefferson, Jackson, Wilson or Lincoln. It's the mindset of the victim at heart - I can't do anything so I'll just suffer noisily because everyone else is an idiot. You have to do more than "Just Say No," because you think everyone but you knows what's what. You have to find those who can bring ideas to which it makes sense to say yes to office, you have to elect the non-scum - they're out there, but you won't find them or be served by them with the kind of attitude that lumps all politicians and public servants into the same sludge bin indiscriminately.
If you want the real U.S. back you have to work for it, we all do, and that means much more than just saying no and bitching about how all politicians suck.