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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.)
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
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!
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
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.
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.
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