AT&T Accidentally Leaks NSA Suit Information

op12 writes "CNET has an article describing how AT&T accidentally leaked sensitive information involving the NSA lawsuit. From the article: 'AT&T's attorneys this week filed a 25-page legal brief striped with thick black lines that were intended to obscure portions of three pages and render them unreadable. But the obscured text nevertheless can be copied and pasted inside some PDF readers, including Preview under Apple's OS X and the xpdf utility used with X11. The deleted portions of the legal brief seek to offer benign reasons why AT&T would allegedly have a secret room at its downtown San Francisco switching center that would be designed to monitor Internet and telephone traffic. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the class action lawsuit in January, alleges that room is used by an unlawful National Security Agency surveillance program.""

Comments

Re:text

[Anonymous Coward]

It might be PI-Redact.pdf from this page?

http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/att/#legal

This "leak" is intentional.

[jthill]

This is a multinational corporation with its global reputation on the line, not some band of trolls that can't abide sunlight. They have very, very smart people running their response. Their bland, everything's-fine, "we're just innocent li'l good boys doing what we should" arguments aren't even remotely plausible candidates for secret filings. It's a dodge, meant to convince the people who want to trust them and divert the ones who don't.

Amazingly Sloppy

[flooey]

Considering they're apparently working with the NSA, it's amazing they were this sloppy. If you've ever seen an NSA release of a classified document that's been scrubbed, it's always very clear that it's either a document that someone has physically overwritten with a black marker and then scanned (such as here), or a document that was edited on a computer, printed out, and then scanned back in again (such as here). They do that precisely so there's no traces of old information left in there. I'm surprised they didn't lend their trick to AT&T.

Re:Here's why _you_ should dismiss the case...

[packetmon]

You're wrong. FACT #1: Novak wrote the column. Cheney and Libby Scooter leaked it to him, read the court documents and get your information correct. FACT#2 Cryptography such as PGP is unbreakable as it is known. Assume? We know the breakdown of that term. FACT#3 If the NSA should decide to sniff encrypted traffic, and if by slight chance they had enough disk space and time to break the message, chances are, within the amount of time needed to break the encryption, an act of terrorism would have been acted out making their sniffing worthless. Takes time to break codes so I suggest you read up on the problems of cracking codes (A Tutorial on Linear and Differential Cryptanalysis)

128-bit encryption: 0.25 sextillion years. That's barebones SSL. PGP with a 4096 bit key? Right...

Re:Here's why _you_ should dismiss the case...

[bunions]

People tend to clump in certain social networks, and phones calls are a decent way of determining this.

This is exactly what the NSA is using the records for. No one is sitting there recording 2 billion phone calls a day. They're building a large call graph and using it as an investigative aid.

http://www.cogitoinc.com/articles/gsn.htm

What the lawyers hid from you

[Anonymous Coward]

For those who cannot read the redacted pdf brief online, here are the parts in bold italics that the lawyers did not want you to read.

Plaintiffs contend that the Klein Declaration is itself sufficient to make out a prima facie case on their statutory claims. But even if one focused only on the two claims as to which plaintiffs make any argument, the Court could not determine the validity of those claims without first evaluating information covered by the government's state secrets assertion. Plaintiffs' suggestion that they need only show that certain communications have been split off into a "secret room" strips multiple elements from the statutes on which their claims are based and glosses over numerous issues that would have to be explored if their claims were ever to be fully litigated.

AT&T cannot confirm or deny any of the facts on which plaintiffs' complaint is based. But it is certain that the Klein Declaration and its associated exhibits are insufficient to demonstrate any illegal conduct by AT&T. Plaintiffs offer no evidence regarding what, if anything, actually happens to any data once it allegedly enters the alleged "secret room." Plaintiffs' purported expert provides merely "suggestive" configurations between unknown equipment in an AT&T facility. See Declaration of J. Scott Marcus In Support of Motion for Preliminary Injunction (Dkt. 32) 74. His strongest opinion, explicitly based "in terms of media claims" is conditioned entirely on a supposition: "if the government is in fact in communication with this infrastructure." Id. 39. Plaintiff's purported expert, of course, has no knowledge whether this is true or not.

Even accepting their allegations as true, plaintiffs' declarations fail to establish their claims. Key factual issues that bear directly on the viability of their legal claims and AT&T's defenses are subject to the Government's state secrets assertion and are unavailable. Without either confirming or denying the plaintiffs' assertions, AT&T notes that the facts recited by plaintiffs are entirely consistent with any number of legitimate Internet monitoring systems, such as those used to detect viruses and stop hackers. Although the plaintiffs ominously refer to the equipment as the "Surveillance Configuration," the same physical equipment could be utilized exclusively for other surveillance in full compliance with the terms of FISA - which even the plaintiffs themselves would not contend is unlawful. See id. 40 ("The SG3 Configurations could be used for a number of legitimate purposes."). The mere existence of these so-called configurations, even if plaintiffs' allegations were accurate, would not by itself be prima facie evidence of what - if any - information is intercepted or divulged or by whom. And it certainly is not prima facie evidence of any illegality. Plaintiffs fail to establish even a prima facie case that there has been an "interception" of "contents" within the meaning of 18 U.S.C. 2510(4) & (8), whether there has been "electronic surveillance" within the meaning of 50 U.S.C. 1801(f), and whether particular statutory exemptions do not apply, see, e.g., 18 U.S.C. 2702(c). Certainly nothing compels the inference that the contents of communications of "millions of ordinary Americans," (Motion for Preliminary Injunction (Dkt. 30) at 11), have been divulged to the government, in contradiction of the government's statement that communications are intercepted only if the government has "a reasonable basis to conclude that one party to the communication is a member of al Qaeda," or otherwise affiliated with al Qaeda. Press Briefing by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and General Michael Hayden, Plaintiffs' Request for Judicial Notice (Attachment 2) (Dkt. 20).

Re:WRONG

[Anonymous Coward]

Regrettably (and I AM trully sorry for both of us), you are are NOT correct. PLEASE read on.

U.S. judges ruled that persons can be tried for breaking the U.S. laws, no matter in which locale said laws were broken.

I cannot hotlink, but click below and look up FederalJudge Whyte's order, which basically states that it is not unconstitutional to prosecute for crimes done outside the jurisdiction of the state

Go to http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/US_v_Elcomsoft/
Look up judge's order under: U.S District Court Judge Ronald Whyte's Order denying Elcomsoft's Motion to Dismiss on Constitutional Grounds. (May 8, 2002)

Yeah, sure, Sklyarov was aquitted by a jury, but the earlier decision stands that stipulates that everybody in the World is subject to the U.S. (Federal) laws.

can be read into adobe acrobat reader

[Anonymous Coward]

How : just change the coloring of the document in the accessibility futures ( custom colors)
It is a very dumb way to hide something , they just applied some formatting and did not delete the text.

Re:Proactive protection...

[Raenex]

The US government has generally been OK with encryption, more or less.

No, they really don't like it. They really want to listen in. The Clipper Chip was proposed by the Clinton administration.