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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.'"
As TFA says:
I can't think of any possible justification for the documents to be kept sealed, but I wouldn't be suprised if the government wades in complaining that these document are directly related to National Security, and, should therefore be kept sealed, or claim that it would endanger their own investigations.
GeekServ Unix Consulting Services (http://www.geekserv.com)
...but here we are. Big Brother REALLY IS watching...
Who did what now?
I would love to cancel my AT&T / SBC services but... my rental agreement requires that I have a phone line for my security system. What can I do? If I complain to AT&T no one will care.
Hmmm, I'm wondering how much traffic that actually is, sounds like some set-up they have there, if they can forward all the customer's traffic.
Would be nice to have a look at that kit.
In 1999, I worked as a contract engineer for a Linux consulting company. We delivered kernel enhancements for the Linux kernel on the Alpha processor to the NSA. The enhancements we to reduce TLB miss overhead when doing comparisons and searches on large amounts of data. The benchmark run to test it was a keyword search through a stream of e-mails. This was to run on a *massive* cluster of Alpha machines. I would guess they've upgraded it several times since then.
1999 was while Clinton was still president, BTW.
(Posted anonymously, for obvious reasons. Though I've probably given enough information that they could narrow it down to about 10 people.)
Um... They will realize it when a majority of the citizens in America actually DO take their rights seriously. There are huge numbers of people that I have met that are not just willing, but eager to give up their rights for security. They are happy to do this because the people who will be tread upon are people they do not know. They are not their friends and familiy, they are "Those People." The people who are abdicating their rights do so not realizing that as rights errode and laws become broader and more encompasing, that they and theirs will eventually be swept up in the "gill net" of justice.
That won't help if they do it correctly. You would need secure, encrypted connections between you and your annonomizer and even then, it really isn't that difficult to break 128bit keys anymore. They have the full contents off all your incomming and outgoing data traffic. In fact, going to an annonimizer will more likely FLAG you then it will if you do what "normal" people do.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
AT&T apparently gave NSA access to databases containing telephone call logs, email content, and web addresses visited, not the raw stream of bits going through their routers. More sources: Wired and The Register. So it's not all internet traffic.
Still an egregious abuse of privacy, IMHO, and one of the reasons I donate to the EFF.
"I'm not, like, that smart. I, like, forget stuff all the time." -- Paris Hilton
My guess is that NSA probably do it the same way Google do it. No magic voodoo hardware, but clever software running on a huge cluster of regular commodity boxes. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Googles, and you're probably not far off.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I can't see how this is possible physically. I mean it is possible but that'd mean that the government would have to out google Google in terms of brains and equipment not to mention the time it would take to peruse through daily traffic patterns.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
I couldn't give half a shit if the NSA looks at my packets. BTW, AT&T is a business that you give money to directly or indirectly. If you don't like what they do, stop paying them. If that means you don't have interent, so be it. Internet connectivity is not a right, but a privilege.
My posts are definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
When you invade Afghanistan even though the Taliban were willing to hand over Bin Laden to a neutral country? No.
When you invade Iraq even though they didn't have WMDs? No.
When you torture prisoners and deny them basic human rights? No.
When your president calls the consitution "a goddamn piece of paper"? No.
But don't you dare threaten the Intarweb!
Seriously, it's a little late to be growing a conscience, isn't it?
I'm sorry, but you are very wrong, because the article
is talking about the *government* doing the evesdropping. Private
parties can intercept communications on their own networks in many
situations - for example there is a "safe harbor provision" that
creates a legal defence for ISP's against wire tapping laws if their
intent is to protect their network.
But the government is strictly forbidden to do many things that private
citizens can do. Wiretapping laws apply to email. The government must
get a wiretap warrant. And intelligence agencies like the NSA are forbidden
by the FISA law from doing it without special approval by the FISA court.
The administration did not ask the court, in direct violation of the law.
The government can not "give permission" to a private party to break the
law.
ATT is guilty of wiretapping, the administration and NSA have violated
the FISA law, and the President must be impeached if we are going to
have any hope of preserving civil liberties.
Don't mess with The Phone Company. Piss them off and you'll be using two tin cans and a piece of string.
Of course the people don't want war...But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger.
--Hermann Goering [wikipedia.org]
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?
Well, in the example you cited, it took the destruction of the country by outside forces.
The notion that the public can take up arms and overthrouw the government in this or most any other developed nation is unrealistic, even with our second amendment right to bear arms. In China, perhaps, a single person can stand up to a line of tanks and stop them, but I don't think the same kind of defiance would work here.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
I complain about the FCC constantly, but if I told people that I was anti-FCC because I was afraid of the abuse that normally comes from regulation-to-be-tyranny, I'd be called Mr. Tinfoil Hat. Yet this is exactly the reason why we have the Constitution limit the power of the federal government -- to prevent them from abusing the citizens as they quietly create a monopoly and then use it to do harm.
Where the federal government has any power over communications is beyond me -- the interstate commerce clause was written so that the federal government could prevent states from intruding on commerce -- no tariffs, no taxes, no abusive cartels. The federal government itself was not given power to actually reduce trade but improve it.
The more we believe that government is helping us, the more we'll be paying in taxes, a declining dollar, and a loss of rights that no one gives us but nature.
You had it right in your first sentence. AT&T is forwarding all of their call data to the NSA. The NSA doesn't need any super-cool tech in order to intercept this data since AT&T (and the other telecom companies) simply send this data directly to them. Don't get me wrong, though - the NSA has some amazing technology. All of this data is processed, filtered, tagged and entered into a massive database.
I'm currently reading Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency by James Bamford. It's not light reading, but it's fascinating....and extremely disturbing. The fascinating part is that we've been here before. This exact scenario already happened in the 60's and 70's, until information about it was leaked (by the NY Times, no less) and it was investigated by the Church Committee circa 1975. It was called Project SHAMROCK then, and it involved the phone companies and Western Union delivering huge magnetic tape reels to the NSA on a regular basis. The project was so secret that only a few people within the NSA where even aware of it.
Until the Congressional investigation, hardly anybody within the White House or Justice Department had even heard whispers of it. Congress, of course, was completely out of the loop. This obsession with secrecy goes back to the very founding of the NSA. The NSA operated with no Congressional oversight for decades (it was called "No Such Agency"), and its existance probably wasn't even constitutionally legal/valid, but the information that it provided to other agencies (mostly the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff) was so good that by the time Congress found out about it, it was indispensible. Today the NSA is the largest of the intelligence agencies (yes you read that right - larger than the CIA), although its exact budget is classified.
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.
The only loonies around here are the people who think that the government isn't spying on Americans every single day. Now, that doesn't mean that they are listening to you in real time, and hanging on your every word. But all/most of your calls are recorded, digitized and handed to the NSA. From there, it is probably entered into a massive database. From there they can filter out unimportant calls and use data mining techniques to pull up relevant information. They use the ECHELON computer software to sift through information, which probably works similar to Google, with keyword searches and a list of search results.
If you still don't believe me, why don't you have a conversation with a friend, where you discuss planting bombs around town. See how long it takes the feds to show up.
Electric Monkey Pants
I think a lot of us have realized it was out of control for quite some time. However aside from voting and writing our congress critters and protesting and trying to stir things up in the media, we are left with few to zero direct options for fixing the situation.
In the old days if you didn't like your government, you would take up arms and overthrow them or have them arrested. These days the government is above the law, and if you were to take up arms against them you would either be killed or considered a terrorist and secretly shipped away to some torture camp.
Honestly, what other options do we have? As much as I love fighting the good fight...I'm strongly considering moving to another country at this point, although from the looks of things globally, it doesn't really seem like there are any places that much better off!
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
You're absolutely right. We, as informed citizens more able to grasp the implications of technology than Joe Sixpack, are the only ones who will be able to bring this problem to light. We are also the only ones that will be able to solve this problem, if it hasn't gone too far already. It's very clear that the government has become very well practiced at spinning their stories and power-plays so that they appeal to anyone who doesn't look past the surface. There are very frightening implications behind the fact that the NSA wiretapping dropped off the public radar (mainstream news and conversation) so quickly. I am not one to quickly don my tinfoil hat, but damn it, it sure does look like the government is inching closer and closer to the point that it will become too good at steering the uninformed majority, and as a member of the informed minority, that is unacceptable to me.
I no longer feel comfortable with the level of privacy that is afforded to a citizen. The fact that we're moving from "default private" to "default public" is horrific. The public internet is no longer a place where we can communicate ideas freely. If you feel the same, join me on http://www.i2p.net/, on the truly anonymous IRC network, in the channel #privacy
The government needs to be checked by the people. If the government becomes too drunk with control before the people try to fix it, the conflict will be a violent one, and the people will lose. We need to regain control before it's too late.
Here's a scary thought... if you can't beat 'em, why not join 'em? The NSA could just use Google as a subcontractor.
After all, Google does have an established practice now of actively cooperating with governments to curtail human rights...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Now this privacy stuff is an all together different beast. To make matters more interesting, AT&T is a company, it's not a government. They can do what they want with their customers data barring that their customers actually have some sort of contract with them about that. You can piss and moan about it but that's how it is.
I've said this a lot. If you're worried about it, then start encrypting your mail, use GPG and Enigmail with Thunderbird or one of the many other mailers that supports encryption. It's easy. Run an onion router, the more peers the harder it is to compromise. Encrypt your IM, encrypt as much of your traffic as possible. Secondarily, and maybe this is a
Apparently AT&T has been providing some of the connection by I doubt that they are the only ones.
It has been intimated in the press that George W. Bush's illegal wire tapping went much deeper than has been admitted to. This is it. All Internet and Voice communications in the United States of America is now or was at some point being recorded by the NSA. It makes sense and it was certainly not just AT&T. Sure you can write that it was only a selected few messages or phone conversations that actually were brought to the attention of real people at NSA, probably measured in the tens of thousands out of many millions of people. But the computers, which were programmed by people, went through every message of every conversation. It is the only way to wiretap the internet in a centralized way without actually physically tapping wires.
When George Walker Bush says they only intercepted messages of terrorists and terrorist associates, it is a lie. They intercept everything and sorted it out later. What he is trying to assure you of is that they don't really care about what you had to say unless you are plotting terrorism, which is probably largely true. But how long until such a powerful tool is directed towards lesser threats? We already know that during the 90's NSA intercepted foreign communications regarding a civilian airbus deal were used by US government to help Boeing win European civilian contracts. How was that for a national security purpose? I am sure they went through mental hoops to think what they were doing was right. And before the mid 1970's the FBI used domestic terrorism as an excuse to wiretap political civil rights and anti war activists when there was no reasonable expectation that these groups or individuals would resort to violence in support of their causes.
A free society must choose to be free.
One of my lecturers once said that the NSA measures (measured?) computing power not in terms of speed or memory size but 'in square miles'.
:)
Probably a joke but he definitely got me thinking about the scale that they were on
I just tried changing the http: URL of this page to https: Just to see if it could be done. The page loaded correctly (no certificate issues) but apparently forwarded me back to the http: page.
You'd think that with so many people here worried about privacy/wiretapping and so forth, slashdot of all places would be completely accessible through SSL, would you?
Even submitting this comment is done through http: instead of https: (Or is that because I'm an Anonymous Coward? Should I give up my anonimity for privacy?)
I don't know. Citing wiretapping laws in regards to the internet? Hasn't there been a bunch of debate on about the internet and phone lines? I know the phone companies have wanted to get a piece of the VoIP pie. Nothing else is coming to mind right now, but it seems like there has been a bunch of talk in this arena. I wonder if they're just opening up a big can of worms.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
Echelon is NOT a fairy tale.
The NSA has more computing power and human analyst brainpower than is probably believable.
Back in the days when I did NeXT machines and software development, I heard that the NSA bought 400 NeXT cubes. The joke was "of course they did...saves them a ton of money on black paint!"
I later heard that the NSA liked the fact that the magnesium case was a pretty effective RF shield.
And then I got to see a NeXT app, Zilla, that let you build an early parallel processing system. Now, 400 Motorola 68040 CPUs isn't a Cray, but it's close. NeXT used 50 cubes to crunch on Fermat's Theorem and got throughout similar to a Cray YMP48 (this was 1990-91, so I may be fuzzy on this, but that's what I think I heard)
So, if the NSA was dorking with massively parallel systems 15-20 years ago, where are they today?
Personally, I think they have the data acquisition capability...with or without AT&T, the processing power, and plenty of human talent to build the data sieves to extract something useful.
Wait a minute...there's a knock at my door................
I am my own gestalt.
Well, I agree with most of that, but I think, at least in terms of minutiae, your last line is off the mark.
A free society must choose NOT to be free.
Ideally the works of Franklin and Paine and Jefferson and Locke and Hobbes and those cats says that we're FREE people, naturally. Freedom is a natural right. They said, and I agree, that we're free, without choosing anything, and it is the choice to give those freedoms away which constitutes government. People today feel that their freedoms are allowed. No one allows my freedom. My freedom IS.
What frightens me more is not that we've said almost the same thing, but that most people think they ARE the same thing. This seems to me a subconscious shift regarding the nature of Freedom. AT&T and the U.S. Government do not *GIVE* freedom. They attempt to manipulate it, often successfully it would seem.
When need a return to revolutionary ideas concerning free peoples. At the very least, when we casually end a comment our natural inclination is to denote freedom is not being a regulatable entity.
Freedom's a lot like the weather. You can stay indoors, you can put on a coat, change your outfit, genetically enhance yourself to cope with it better, but it EXISTS, naturally, and no matter what comes on the Weather Channel, the weather keeps on doing what it is doing. Freedom is a realistically natural provision, not a construct created from a system.
Sorry for the mini-rant, but it was such a good post, I couldn't help nitpick something.
Now it's happening here. Debt is a staggering 6% of GDP, the citizenry is increasingly becoming uneducated and anti-intellectual, production of finished goods and raw materials are moving offshore, and the rights and freedoms that used to be the rallying cry of our nation are eroding one by one. We're sliding ever faster towards a fascist system of government, where large corporations and a single powerful semi-dictatorial government figure control everything in the country, for the benefit of those few corporate elites and to the detriment of everyone else. Much like the Roman Empire which slid from a representative republic to a monarchy to a dictatorship to a pile of ruins, the American Empire is unmistakably on the downslope of history now.
In my opinion, it can't happen soon enough. The collapse of the American Empire will end all the debates about using forceful interventions in foreign countries, we won't have the coin for it. We also won't have enough coin to fund these massively intrusive government programs, or the hugely bloated, corporate-welfare laden half-trillion a year "defense" outlay. Hopefully we will finally be able to pass clean-money laws, and get some people into office who are truly interested in the public good instead of the source of their next big fat corporate campaign contribution.
"Why don't you interface with my ass...by biting it!" -Bender B. Rodriguez
And another one is that an armed rebellion simply isn't viable anymore these days.
I disagree. The US has a great deal of ability to lay waste to large areas. They can't do that within the US and not just growing a larger resistance. As you may have noted from Iraq, people get upset when you drop bombs on them and murder their relatives and friends.
Small arms and improvised munitions in the US are very effective and plentiful. People with experience using them are common. In a real rebellion a significant number of the military, ex-military, and police would probably side with the rebellion. At any given time a significant number of US troops are tied up overseas. Many foreign nations would be happy to clandestinely support a war within the US.
So basically, I just don't buy it. Armed rebellion is very possible, should the population be motivated. (Not that I see that happening. The population lacks education and will. So long as they have beer and TV, they are sheep.)
I hate to break it to you but the last small republic Republicans died out with Goldwater in the 70s. Ever since the Reagan (proto neo-con) era the Republicans have represented big governments (deficits increased under Reagan), increased domestic ebulliences, and increased foreign intervention that the founding fathers correctly warned us was such a bad idea. And no the Demolames aren't better, since Clinton and the DLC took over the Dems they have "triangulated," i.e. copied the Repigs worst moves. Most people think that it's under the Clinton error that the NSA expanded at the most rapid rates, and far from having a few next boxes they most likely had a Danny Hilis connection machine by the early 90s. Hint connection machine equal tens of thousands of processors in a massively parallel configuration:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine
"Thinking Machines sold seven CM-1s, but only because DARPA brokered and subsidized most of the deals. If the company was going to stay in business, it would need a machine that could pull its weight outside AI research. Unfortunately, according to Resnikov, the decision to tailor the CM-1 to the AI "nonmarket" cost Thinking Machines three years in the real-world marketplace.
In April 1986, Thinking Machines announced the arrival of the CM-2, a machine the scientific community actually could use. The CM-2 was able to run FORTRAN and to do floating-point operations. It was also a piece of work artistically: a five-foot cube of cubes -- done up in what Thinking Machines employees called "Darth Vader black" -- in whose innards red lights flickered mysteriously. But the machine's exotic massively parallel technology still needed special software, which meant its users had to learn new programming techniques. The CM-2 might be more like the human brain than a sequential computer like the Cray was, but scientists knew how to write programs for the Cray. Many of Thinking Machines' first customers, says Dave Waltz, who ran the company's AI group, did most of their computing on the floating-point processors, ignoring the 64,000 single-bit processors."
http://www.inc.com/magazine/19950915/2622.html
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Is it still technically 'wiretapping' if there is no wire, ...?
...
Sure, just as what I'm doing now is "typing" although there's not a typewriter in the house.
It's still "wiretapping" when it's wireless, as this message will be when I hit the "Submit" button.
For that matter, that thingie is still a "button" although it's just made of pixels on the screen, and will cease to "exist" milliseconds after I "hit" it.
If we're not careful, this could lead to a deep discussion on the nature of reality. Or at least the nature of linguistic referents.
Here goes
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
We ought to remember that President Washington also warned of the dangers of standing armies:
While, then, every part of our country thus feels an immediate and particular interest in union, all the parts combined cannot fail to find in the united mass of means and efforts greater strength, greater resource, proportionably greater security from external danger, a less frequent interruption of their peace by foreign nations; and, what is of inestimable value, they must derive from union an exemption from those broils and wars between themselves, which so frequently afflict neighboring countries not tied together by the same governments, which their own rival ships alone would be sufficient to produce, but which opposite foreign alliances, attachments, and intrigues would stimulate and embitter. Hence, likewise, they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty. In this sense it is that your union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of the other.
And from Eisenhower:
Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Very precient, both of them.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
History supports your arguments, many empires used the tactics you described to gain absolute power. Unimpeded by citizens or enemies, these empires seemed unbeatable. Yet all these empires eventually collapsed, not due to enemy fire, but due to incompetent leadership.
The Romans weren't defeated by savages, but by their own nobles that diverted state funds for their lavish lifestyles and filled the military ranks with inept nephews. The National Socialists weren't defeated by the Allies, but by a landscape painter and obese huntsman that refused to let experts wage war and diplomacy. The Soviets weren't defeated by "freedom fighters", but by corruption so widespread that it couldn't feed its own people. The US isn't losing the war in Iraq, it's being defeated by its own leaders' abject incompetence and a system that funnels war funds into the wallets of cronies instead of accomplishing necessary goals. Etc.
This empire shall also pass.