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

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

[BrynM]

From TFA:

Lawyers for the Justice Department have offered to fly a courier from Washington to San Francisco with classified documents that Walker could review in private--documents that, in the eyes of the government, will convince him to dismiss the lawsuit. (The Bush administration also argues that EFF lawyers should not be permitted to see the classified information.)

I can just imagine what's in those documents... "here's a picture of your granddaughter next to one of our agents at school... here's a picture of your toothbrush - I wonder what's on it... Here's a picture of your wife sitting at home masturbating thinking she was alone (heh)... Here's a picture of you and your secretary."

Sorry, but with this administration, it's hard not to assume some underhanded strong-armin^^^^^ persuasion.

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

[packetmon]

Cryptome has had copies of these documents for some time (about a week). You should take some time to read them. This gentleman falls in line with Michael Lynn who lost his job for disclosing Cisco's flaws. With the government wanting to monitor everything and its mother, I think it serves them right to have the truth exposed. If you'd like an interesting read, read on:

mass surveillance of the entire population is logically plausible if NSA's domestic spying is not looking for terrorists, but looking for something else, something that is not so rare as terrorists. For example, the May 19 Fox News opinion poll of 900 registered voters found that 30% dislike the Bush administration so much they want him impeached. If NSA were monitoring email and phone calls to identify pro-impeachment people, and if the accuracy rate were .90 and the error rate were .01, then the probability that people are pro-impeachment given that NSA surveillance system identified them as such, would be p=.98, which is coming close to certainty (p_1.00). Mass surveillance by NSA of all Americans' phone calls and emails would be very effective for domestic political intelligence.

But finding a few terrorists by mass surveillance of the phone calls and email messages of 300 million Americans is mathematically impossible, and NSA certainly knows that. The Politics of Paranoia and Intimidation

Anyhow, here's an unredacted excerpt:

In January 2003, I, along with others, toured the AT&T central office on Folsom Street in San Francisco -- actually three floors of an SBC building. There I saw a new room being built adjacent to the 4ESS switch room where the public's phone calls are routed. I learned that the person whom the NSA interviewed for the secret job was the person working to install equipment in this room. The regular technician work force was not allowed in the room.

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

[bunions]

But finding a few terrorists by mass surveillance of the phone calls and email messages of 300 million Americans is mathematically impossible

That's an interesting* assertion that I see no proof of in the linked article. And of course, it rests what feeble attempts at proof on (a) complete guesswork and (b) the assumption that phonetapping is the only factor in identifying terrists. That entire article is a complete nonsequiter.

*by 'interesting' I mean 'stupid'

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

[zacronos]

You make good points, but here's something else to consider: people tend to clump in social networks when they're not actively trying to avoid such detection. As it has become well-known that examining social networks is a useful technique, you can bet the smart terrorists have taken measures to foil this, and you can also bet the smart terrorists have had tutorials written for the not-so-smart terrorists. While it might still be useful for small-time terrorists, the big boys are most certainly extremely hard to nail down this way.

So, while I agree with you to some extent, I still have to think that these call records will not produce a lot of results against the targets we are most concerned about. I agree with you that the idea of tracking people who want to impeach Bush is ridiculous... but did you see the article about reporter phone records being used to find leaks? I think social networking would work much better for that task, where the people probably weren't trying as hard to cover their tracks, which is along the lines of what the previous poster was suggesting.

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

[Vancorps]

Except that they indeed found one who could have led them to 18 others. Why wasn't the information passed on to law enforement? Didn't the FAA notice the planes weren't exactly on course? Knowing that info wouldn't that have given them enough evidence to order an evacuation? Shooting the planes down would have probably been very unlikely for reasons I imagine are obvious.

Seems to me like there is already too much fragmentation going on. They need to be able to pass info to the people that can make a difference. As long as they can't do that then they've no business collecting even more information which will be mishandled even further.

I know what you saying, break the info apart but what if a seedy character had my phone number before me? Does that mean I'm under surveillance and instantly labeled a terrorist? This doesn't work because the information obtained is ineffective. If they suspect someone in particular then they can tap that individual line. If they suspect 20 people surrounding it are involved then yes indeed they can be tapped as well, that is reasonable and probable cause. Doing this to every phone is pointless and a huge waste of resources which could be devoted to analyzing the data they already have and then notifying the people that will make a difference. If you're going to change the law for the NSA make it so they can legally pass the info on to the FBI and local law enforcement. That is all that is required and far less invasive.

Proactive protection...

[Volante3192]

So, if there really are...
benign reasons why AT&T would allegedly have a secret room at its downtown San Francisco switching center
then why did...
the Bush administration [submit] a 29-page brief that elaborates on its argument that the case should be tossed out of court because of the "state secrets" privilege?

Seems like if they didn't do anything illegal they have nothing to fear.

What's amazing is

[thealsir]

That the US as a whole doesn't seem to give a shit about this. Look at the results of polls. Ranges from general aloofness to "it's good for National Security(TM)." Look at T's stock price. Huh, normally a company with such an incriminating lawsuit wielded against it would take at least somewhat of a hit in price (though the markets ARE very wierd right now). It seems that the techie crowd are the very small minority of folks who actually care that their phone calls were tracked without ANY precedent in the first place. We're not talking warrantless tracking, we're talking completely random warrantless tracking. What was the saying in Rome? Feed the masses and give them entertainment, and you can do anything to them.

Re:What's amazing is

[slashes]

I totally agree to what you're saying. Their stock has NOT taken too much of a hit admist all of this controversy. But I do think there are other people, not just us 'techies' who actually do care what's happening. What I find funny about all this is how AT&T still denies that the room had anything to do with the NSA program. I mean, honestly, who in here DOESN'T THINK they were eavesdropping? I think they knew perfectly what was going on, what was happening, and how this was illegal.

Re:What's amazing is

[QuantumRiff]

The population as a whole can not conceptialize the power of correlated data. They see shopping "club cards" and see that they get a better price. They watch "24", and see that the bad guys are caught cause their license plates are pulled up in 5 seconds (all bad guys drive their own vehicles, of course!).. they see stoplight cams taking pictures of license plates as making the streets safer..

We geeks deal with data every day. We understand that patterns can be drawn from it, often very incorrect patterns based off of incomplete data.

The non-geeks cannot comprehend that in the next very few short years, they will get a knock on the door, and the police will say, On Thursday, at 8am, you shopped at the grocery store on 10th street, bought a bunch of bannana's and some milk. 20 minutes later, you were seen driving buy at 3MPH over the speed-limit on this street, which is only 5 minutes from the grocery store. You had better account for exactly what you did during that 15 minutes, because we are placing you under arrest for a crime that was commited in that area at that time. We also see that you have called your nephew 3 times in the last month, who was served 6 months (several years ago) in jail for an assault. And you give money to the ACLU, which makes our job harder.

Re:What's amazing is

[rbochan]

That the US as a whole doesn't seem to give a shit about this....

The US government must think that Americans are lazy, brainless sheep who will shut out even the most obvious evidence that criminals are running the country. I mean seriously, only the most idiotic... Oh look! American Idol is on!

When will they learn?

[cdavies]

I swear, I've heard about so many instances of this exact same attack, I stop feeling sorry for the idiots who are surely going to get fired for this.

If it's not people who don't really understand how postscript works, it's people who don't realise those 4MB word files contain more than just the visible part of the document....

Dumb and dumber....

[gweihir]

Every educated person should now know that black bars in PDF do not remove what is under them. There were several high-profile cases in the press by now.

In addition, do these people not employ any security experts that tell them how to do this right? Making clean (text) documents is really easy: Export to ASCII, remove text, import as ASCII. But obviously this low-tech approach needs a qualified high wizard of computing today.

Not that I mind that these amoral scum got bitten.

Re:Dumb and dumber....

[jandrese]

That destroys the formatting and makes your work look very unprofessional. There are better ways to redact information from a PDF.

The biggest problem is that it's a paradigm shift for these people and they're not ready for it. The "Black Bars" always worked with regular documents, but when they were forced (against their will) to switch to electronic documents many people tried to find ways to make all of their old procedures work with the new format. This always happens when you force people to switch to technologies they're not comfortable with, and throughout history has been an enormous source of lost productivity and security leaks. The kind of people who are making these mistakes aren't the kind of people who read Slashdot, they're the ones that are thankful when they can finally go home every night and get away from those godforsaken computers for the rest of the day.

Re:Dumb and dumber....

[(H)elix1]

Not that I mind that these amoral scum got bitten.

But did they? I mean, if I wanted to sow disinformation, hiding something with the intent it might be found is a great way to it.

(/me double checks tinfoil hat... and peeks outside for black helicopters)

Re:Dumb and dumber....

[gEvil (beta)]

Actually, I'm willing to bet that the black bars were put in there using Word, then the whole thing was exported to PDF. Same net effect, though. As someone who blinds electronic manuscripts for peer review, I'm amazed by how many people don't get this simple concept. The method that I've found that works best is just replacing said text with a series of XXXXs. If you have any leeway with page-flow, insert random numbers of XXXXXXs in there. If you don't, then hope that others can't use the length of the XXXXXXXXXs to figure out how long the word(s) that are blinded used to be.

Why are they suing AT&T?

[Anonymous Coward]

You think they would sue the ones actually responsible for making this all happen, you know, the fucking government?

  Suing AT&T really misses the point...

Re:Why are they suing AT&T?

[Spy der Mann]

Suing AT&T really misses the point...

No, it tells companies that the government isn't the only one they should fear.

Re:Why are they suing AT&T?

[deblau]

You think they would sue the ones actually responsible for making this all happen, you know, the fucking government?

Under settled principles of sovereign immunity, the United States, as sovereign, is immune from suit, save as it consents to be sued. United States v. Dalm, 494 U.S. 596, 608 (1990) (internal quotes omitted). A necessary corollary of this rule is that when Congress attaches conditions to legislation waiving the sovereign immunity of the United States, those conditions must be strictly observed, and exceptions thereto are not to be lightly implied. Block v. North Dakota, 461 U.S. 273, 287 (1983).

Point me to a statute that explicitly recognizes the right of a private citizen to bring suit against the NSA for this kind of thing, and then we'll continue the discussion. (The Fourth Amendment might be used, in conjunction with Article III section 2 and 28 U.S.C. 1331 or 28 U.S.C. 1346(a)(2), but there's a tricky issue of standing to be resolved. Without at least some evidence of the NSA spying on the plaintiff individually, there's no way to support a claim of actual injury, and the case will be dismissed on a Rule 12(b)(6) motion.)

Re:This "leak" is intentional.

[Exatron]

Just because they're smart doesn't mean that they can't make stupid mistakes.

Re:text

[Anonymous Coward]

as usual, it's on cryptome.

http://cryptome.org/klein-decl.htm

It's not this admin, liberal JFK spied on ML King

[AHumbleOpinion]

I can just imagine what's in those documents... "here's a picture of your granddaughter next to one of our agents at school... here's a picture of your toothbrush - I wonder what's on it... Here's a picture of your wife sitting at home masturbating thinking she was alone (heh)... Here's a picture of you and your secretary." Sorry, but with this administration, it's hard not to assume some underhanded strong-armin^^^^^ persuasion.

Excuse me, *this* administration. You lost quite a bit of credibility on that one. *Any* administration can do such things. Read up on President John F Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy's surveilance of Martin Luther King.

Stupid EFF

[jhylkema]

Knowing their history, we will probably have it soon enshrined in our caselaw that the President may spy on any American anytime he wants for any reason or no reason.

Actual Contents of Secret Room

[Analogy Man]

From the decoded text the following here are the contents of this and other secret rooms:

• A massive stockpile of red Swingline staplers
• Jimmy Hoffa (NSA got to the horse ranch first...oh how they'll laugh at the Christmas party)
• Massive stash of Bush/Cheney/Ashcroft "home movies" from Frisco area bath house during W's coke days
• Osama and 72 virgins
• Geraldo Rivera

Re:It's not this admin, liberal JFK spied on ML Ki

[evilviper]

Excuse me, *this* administration. You lost quite a bit of credibility on that one. *Any* administration can do such things. Read up on President John F Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy's surveilance of Martin Luther King.

Excuse me, *Kennedy*. You lost quite a bit of credibility on that one. Read up on FISA and specifically what year it was enacted.

Don't need anything special.

[Transcendent]

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.

Also works with the normal Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0 for Windows. No DMCA mumbo-jumbo... whoever did it just had no idea what they were doing.

NSA itself isn't really the problem.

[Polarism]

On the whole, the concept of the agency is great, vital to the nation.

The problems come in when required legal processes are ignored by the powers that be.

I feel ashamed to have worked under that agency for a couple of years. What is going on here is against the very mantra they preach to you regarding the performance of your duties. Violating the laws against collection on US Citizens used to be about on the same level as screwing a horse. Now it seems to be quite acceptable, at least by the upper echelon of management.