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

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

[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: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.

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.