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.'"

Comments

Coincidence?

[MyLongNickName]

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?

Re:Coincidence?

[MyLongNickName]

Next time yell "Frist Post!" Damn noobs... gotta explain everything to them.

Re:Coincidence?

[Rosyna]

The funny thing is that this is exactly the first thing that came to my mind.

After reading your comment I think thought, "And perhaps this is why Net Neutrality will never happen."

Re:Coincidence?

[Stop Error]

That why I do, and encourage others to, donate to the EFF.

Re:Coincidence?

[Dhalka226]

And you wonder why the feds have no problem with the AT&T monopoly getting back together?

The feds--and many economists--have no problem with AT&T essentially reassembling itself because competition exists today that did not exist in the past. Cable companies, wireless companies and straight VoIP providers can all provide telephone service in direct competition with typical land-line phone companies. The phone companies are also competing with those companies on THEIR domains (for example, video over Internet lines--the reason they're interested in laying fiber all of the sudden).

These new forms of competition are also, undoubtedly, why you are hearing phone companies beginning to make a stink about charging people to carry traffic over their pipes.

Re:Coincidence?

[Narcissus]

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 :)

Re:Coincidence?

[jc42]

One word: Encryption

Start using it, get everyone you know to use it. Encrypt everything.

Exactly. Those of us who are Internet old-timers have long understood that the online world is in fact totally open. There is no privacy online. Never has been, and never will be.

You should always assume that everything here is visible to everyone, and may be archived at lots of places you don't know about. The NSA's archives are just one of many places where our words and pictures are being enshrined for posterity. Consider, for example, that every email you've ever sent is potentially available to every prospective employer, and to all your relatives and friends.

There is nothing much any of us can do about this. If you don't like this, don't put things online. This includes email. As soon as it goes out of your machine, you have no way of knowing who has a copy.

Encryption is partly successful at fighting this. If you've used a good encryption scheme, reading your words will be very expensive for a bystander, so they won't do it without good reason. But with enough computing power, most encryption other than a truly random one-time pad can be broken. And computing power is getting cheaper, so with time, the cost of decrypting your stuff will drop. So it will mostly buy you time before your stuff can be read by everyone.

The real problem now is that, while everything on the Internet is potentially visible to those with political and economic power, the opposite isn't true. Imagine the effects if everything in every government and corporate office (and neighborhood bar ;-) were visible to the public.

OK; what would mostly happen is that in most cases the onlookers would fall asleep. But it's interesting to think of a world in which we could access all of our own governments' and employers' information. This could go a long way toward loosening their power over us.

There have been a few sci-fi novels written that deal with such a scenario. Anyone want to mention their favorite?

Re:Coincidence?

[jc42]

AT&T is a company, it's not a government. They can do what they want with their customers data ...

Actually, they're more a shell corporation that exists partly so that this sort of logic can be used to exempt them from legal restrictions (such as the Bill of Rights) than would apply to a government agency. They have always been a government agency in all but the legal niceties.

Their basic business involves selling something that pretty much has to be done by a government agency. Otherwise, we'd have the scenario of hundreds or thousands of companies running wires down our streets. At any given time, half those wires would be down, the streets would be impassible by vehicles, and our kids and pets would be in danger of electrocution if they wandered outside. So the government outlaw such wiring, except to strictly regulated corporations.

(This isn't hypothetical. Here in Boston, we've had several large dogs electrocuted by contact with a manhole cover, and in New York, at least one human has died this way. The pseudo-private electric companies haven't been punished in any meaningful way for these deaths.)

The problem is that in the US and many other countries, there are legal restrictions on how a government agency can (mis)use this wiring. The Bill of Rights guarantees us freedom of speech, assembly, and so on. A government agency couldn't enforce a "no servers" rule, for instance; we'd just say "First Ammendment", and the courts would rule in our favor. A government agency couldn't legally restrict our use of the wires, just as they can't restrict our use of the roads, unless they could show that we're engaged in illegal activities. A government agency couldn't intercept and record our traffic without a court order.

But AT&T can legally do all these things, because legally they're "not government". They are created by the government, their monopoly is enforced by the government, and they are at the mercy of the government for their regulated profits. So they act like a government agency, but one without the need to abide by such silly restrictions as the Bill of Rights.

We're just seeing one of the more blatant violations of the Bill of Rights that this legal arrangement makes possible.

Will they open documents?

[liliafan]

I am so glad I use verizon as my ISP.

As TFA says:

The internal AT&T documents and portions of the supporting declarations have been submitted to the Court under a tentative seal, a procedure that allows AT&T five court days to explain to the Court why the information should be kept from the public.

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.

It begins

[voice_of_all_reason]

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

Re:It begins

[slavemowgli]

And another one is that an armed rebellion simply isn't viable anymore these days. A few hundred years ago, everyone had access to the same weapons, the same intelligence tools, the same everything, and soldiers were often volunteers or draftees; nowadays, you don't have access to any serious weaponry, you don't have the same access to information, and you don't have access to any kind of other military equipment, and most soldiers are indeed professionals who're well-trained and indoctrinated to blindly obey orders and think of you as "the enemy".

Even if 99% of the population *were* upset to the point of demanding change, what could they do? The soap box doesn't work because we live in a system where only two parties have the power, and where anyone else simply does not and never will stand a chance. The ballot box doesn't work because elections are manipulated. The jury box doesn't work because the "president" simply declares himself to be above the law, because congress is controlled by his own party as well, and because the courts are either powerless themselves (the lower courts) or gleichgeschaltet (SCOTUS). And finally, the ammo box won't work for the above reasons.

I still like to think that things aren't *that* bad... and maybe they aren't, compared to other countries like China. But I also really wonder whether what we see is only the tip of the iceberg, and if the iceberg itself isn't just as big as that in China, for example. Sure, you won't get arrested for being a member of a minor party, for example, but that may just be because there's no way for you to change things, anyway - you're being allowed the have the illusion that you can change things, which keeps you from seeing what things *really* are like and from *really* trying to change them.

Re:It begins

[voice_of_all_reason]

Take a look at the progress of states that eventually got to instituting far-off prison camps and bread lines. Things went from "bad" to "terrible" very quickly. At the risk of godwinning this thread, early 20th century Germany's 9/11 took place in 1933 (the reichtag fire). Within 6 years they had declared war and in 12 had been completely defeated.

Details...

[deanj]

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.

You think Verizon is different?

[l2718]

Remember Carnivore? The US intelligence agencies have had for years the capability to analyze some of the Internet traffic going through the US. To do so they must have some direct connection to the backbone. Apparently AT&T has been providing some of the connection by I doubt that they are the only ones. Given that they were able to intercept communications in foreign countries I would surely expect them to be able to access the backbone even if no local company co-operated and hence I assume that anything I transmit unencrypted is accessible to US intelligence. So far this hasn't led me to encrypt any non-commercial communications.

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.

Re:You think Verizon is different?

[bigpat]

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.

What does it take?

[KingSkippus]

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:

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

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.

Re:Gee, how long will it take...

[MustardMan]

The problem is, MOST of us don't take our rights pretty damn seriously. When the patriot act was passed, people cheered the gub'ment for protecting them. Our society is complacent, living on the opinions spoonfed to them by a goverment that lies through its teeth to obtain its goals, and a corporate media that manipulates the information they recieve so they either don't realize or don't care that the government is giving more and more power to big business while taking away the rights of the average Joe.

Look at the issues in the elections, its all about gay marriage (taking away someone's rights to make them live the way you want them to) and other meaningless bullshit. No one is going to get elected running on a platform of restoring personal freedom. And that's truly sad.

Re:Hmm

[Cheapy]

What? You're glad that you aren't helping the Fight Against the Islamic Terrorists?

You must be one of them!

Re:Email isn't protected communications.

[gowen]

I don't know why the FSF's lawyers bother to take these cases to court. There are hundreds of qualified, informed judges here on slashdot, just waiting for their inevitable promotion to the Supreme Court.

Re:Gee, how long will it take...

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

I wonder, how long will it take for our government to realize that most of us take our rights pretty damn seriously

The scariest part is I don't know how true that is. Now I have no scientific polling or anything but just the people I speak to it seems the majority have the opinion:

- If your not doing anything wrong what are you worried about?
or
- Well we have to take care of our national security first before any rights really matter

That a government will so readily abuse its power is certainly not a suprise (disturbing but entirely predictable). However, the ease with which so many citizens seem ready to give up protections we have taken for granted is the scariest part (at least to me).

Re:Damn that's a lot of Data

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

Re:Out of control ?

[meringuoid]

seems like the enemy is very much within

Which is exactly why we need a state crackdown, and to spy on our own civilians! Who knows what the Enemy Within might be plotting? It would be disastrous if one of these people, with no respect for the rights and traditions of Western civilisation, were to infiltrate the corridors of power - imagine the damage that could be done!

Re:Gee, how long will it take...

[voice_of_all_reason]

This is how liberty dies. To thunderous applause.

Re:how sad

[Colonel Angus]

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?

Wrong

[kleine18]

TAT 14, the latest transatlantic cable (circa 2001) has four fiber pairs. Each uses 16 wavelengths of STM-64 (10 Gbps). That is 640 Gbps total. ATT is part owner.

Shamrock lives!

[Refried Beans]

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.

why do people presume any privacy at all?

[peter303]

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.

In Soviet Russia...

[Opportunist]

...the government monitors its citizens.

Oh, wait...

Nevermind. Nothing to see here, move on please.

Re:Details... I've got details.

[Paladin144]

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.

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.

Re:Email isn't protected communications.

[Politburo]

Sorry, but you're wrong. The FISA Law covers "electronic surveillance" and that includes email. The government is therefore prohibited from domestic eavesdropping without a warrant or FISA court order.

Re:how sad

[geoffspear]

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.

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.

I'm so sick of "Current Administration"

[Sloppy]

Why do people say "current administration" when they're talking about crap that every single other administration in the last 70 years, would (and did, or did try to) also do?

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."

TATs are *more* than Gigabit capable

[Myrrh]

What are you on?

TAT-14, the newest iteration of US-to-UK transatlantic communication cable, consists of 32 STM-64 circuits. Each STM-64 is capable of nearly 10 Gbps...

Echelon anyone?

[UttBuggly]

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................

Seems like a good time to mention...

[Garse Janacek]

...the EFF is also supporting a freely available, public anonymity system. Download a copy and browse anonymously!

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.)

Stop repeating this...

[btempleton]

The EFF does not have a "losing record." Please stop repeating this. That was what appeared to be a hoax posting in the Register for some reason picked up in slashdot. It was simply made up. The hoax cited some lost cases that were not EFF cases. The EFF has a record of many significant victories, check out the web site. Of course the EFF does not win all the time, if we did it would mean we were being far too cautious in chosing what to defend, but please stop repeating this "losing record" stuff.

Re:Stop repeating this...

[ntk]

Here's the (partial) list of EFF legal victories - over forty key cases, each against tough opponents. That's not including the work EFF does lobbying against bad laws, technical research on topics like cracking DES, analysing printer dots, and publicising issues like the broadcast flag and the dangers of DRM. To get an example of the breadth of that work, here's another short list of EFF's work last year. We chopped the list at 15 items because the list was compiled for our fifteenth anniversary.