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Ex AT&T Tech Says NSA Monitors All Web Traffic
Sir Tandeth writes "A former technician at AT&T, who alleges that the telecom giant forwards virtually all of its internet traffic into a 'secret room' to facilitate government spying, says the whole operation reminds him of something out of Orwell's 1984. Appearing on MSNBC's Countdown program, whistleblower Mark Klein told Keith Olbermann that all Internet traffic passing over AT&T lines was copied into a locked room at the company's San Francisco office — to which only employees with National Security Agency clearance had access. 'Klein was on Capitol Hill Wednesday attempting to convince lawmakers not to give a blanket, retroactive immunity to telecom companies for their secret cooperation with the government. He said that as an AT&T technician overseeing Internet operations in San Francisco, he helped maintain optical splitters that diverted data en route to and from AT&T customers. '"
The future of internet is encrypted internet.
and there are pictures of the secret room at AT&T here [wired.com] Hmm, interesting. Two pictures of random signs that could be anywhere, and two pictures of the front of the building. None of which show anything remotely interesting. Incriminating stuff, that :)
Not that I don't think they do this, just that the pictures are....underwhelming...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The fact that a thing cannot be done well in a reasonable amount of time within a predetermined budget has never gotten in the way of our government trying to do it anyway.
Dare to Hope. Prepare to be Disappointed.
What's worse is that this will be justified under the guise of anti-terrorism. As bills get passed to erode the freedom of American's, I'm watching the US slowly descend into totalitarianism. Lets face it, Americans just don't care. And why should they? They live comfortable lives, entertained with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. If they follow the rules, they won't get hassled. Things will have to get pretty bad until people wake up and realize what has happened.
While I doubt that they "save" all the traffic, it is entirely possible, that transmitted data is scanned for certain key words and the flagged packets are then investigated further. I think it isn't unreasonable to suspect that the ENTIRE web traffic moving in and out of the computers of some AT&T clients is recorded.
Given this data, it is entirely clear that there is no reason to believe that any non-encrypted data is not going to be monitored, recorded, and traced.
While we must try to abort this particular endeavor through the civil process, it is rather clear to me that it's likely to be a futile effort. The way I see it, as the technological capability for total surveillance draws closer, the government and commercial entities will not be far behind.
But still, it's a good thing we have Fox News. Otherwise where would I get all the newest info on my favorite celebrities (what's that silly Paris up to today)? Or how I would know which ethnic/religious/political group to direct my hatred towards?
But alas, they don't hate us for our freedom and never have. So we're very busily and efficiently solving the wrong problem.
They hate us because we've been meddling in their governments, undermining their sovereignty, propping up dictators favorable to us, invading them when those propped up dictators fall out favor, all for our own national self interests.
I know your post was intended to be funny, and was, but the irony of situation is even worse.
Taking away our freedoms will never stop foreign terrorists from hating us for jerking their countries around. But it might well spawn an outbreak of domestic terrorism if they keep at it. The Unabomber was just a prelude, as the very type of stuff he lashed out about is coming to pass.
"Next, I don't buy it because it's not feasible. How many NSA agents would it take to monitor ALL Internet traffic."
You assuming at least a couple things here
A: That Agents are monitoring the traffic. Could be they are filtering for keywords. Storing for later review.
B: That they are looking at all the traffic.
And on fighting terrorism, how about we stop sending them money that ends up making
them such a valuable part of the world? And I don't know what is wrong with leaving
them alone, really. There is some legitimacy to their grievances, you know.
What is now Israel was Palestine ( and before that had a variety of owners,
none of them Jewish until you get *really* far back ). Britain decides for
partition, and you have to give up your homeland, your business, your home
so that a bunch of people who have been practicing terrorism in your country
can have a home? If it were you, you would be pissed, and fighting back,
so would I. Why is that so hard to understand? Now, don't go getting on any
"you must hate Israelis" thing, furthest thing from the truth. I understand
( and support ) the idea of Israel having a homeland, but I also understand
that the Palestinians want the same, and have been moved to provide it for
the Israelis. Not to mention all the building that Israelis have done in
the contested areas to attempt to annex those areas.
And America has involved itself in this conflict, supplying arms and money
to support Israel.
I don't know what all the answers are, but starting the discussion with
ignoring where all the parties are "at" is not wise.
emt 377 emt 4
Is monitoring on a wire better just because it happens far away where you can't see it?
I suppose you feel that it's tolerable as long as government and law enforcement remain reasonably democratic and every officer of the law remains reasonably uncorrupted. But how long will they remain this way, and not succumb to the temptations inherent in these arrangements? Temptation has a very strong corrupting effect. or prevent you from voting? Democracy isn't just voting. Lots of countries have voting without being democratic.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
Could be ... communism
With a few exceptions, the kinds of curtailment that are happening or being attempted now were not tried on a large scale when communism was the major scare. Instead, the fact that such measures weren't in place was held up as the difference between us and the communists.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
And yet they don't bomb Mexico, Canada, Africa, Japan, Russia, etc even though they're all different cultures. You're fooling yourself if you think that our political actions don't put us towards the top of their shitlist.
Indeed some muslims want to kill us all. Does that warrant spending over http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSN24507537200710242 TRILLION dollars mostly borrowed from the Chinese to kill them? Our president spends money like a teenager with a credit card, without care for who's going to have to pay it back or the price of interest. That kind of short-sightedness is going to screw us over in the next 30 years.
Some people also don't believe that the Constitution is a suicide pact.
I would rather die than allow the protections guaranteed to us by the Constitution to be stolen from us.
Anybody who would not is a wretched coward.
Your words are, frankly, insulting to the millions of individuals who lost their liberty, lives, property, and loved ones in REAL totalitarian states. Read the Gulag Archipelago sometime and get informed. The problem is, that the REAL totalitarian states never just appear fully formed. They go through stages. Germany before WWI had a constitution and elected its leaders in a democratic (or at least Republican, to be more correct) fashion. There were no gas chambers then.
Another example is that the Jews were forced to wear the yellow "star of david" on their clothes in 1938. If they were to complain about the regulations and say that they were living in a "police state", then by your logic they could easily be ridiculed because the concentration camps such as Auschwitz had not been built yet -- construction on those started in 1940. By your logic the star of david is just a patch on a coat, nothing to be worried about, right? So by your words and logic they would be "frankly, insulting" their future selves who would be dying in the gas chambers two years later.
The problem with your logic is that you are saying that a person cannot complain about the totalitarian nature of his country until he can be killed for just complaining about the totalitarian nature of his country -- a "catch 22".
America is definitely becoming less and less free every day and more authoritarian -- that is very easy to see. The right of privacy is guaranteed by our constitution, and when it is public knowledge that our government is publicly ignoring that constitution that is definitely the time to complain. Our constitution was created to protect us from our government and when our government starts treating it like toilet paper it is time definitely time to do something. I honestly think you feel good about yourself through pretending you live in a totalitarian state for the same reason that Christians enjoy hearing stories about "persecuted Christians" in third-world hell holes. It is illegal for the government to do domestic warrantless wiretapping, yet they admit that they are doing it. It is illegal for the government to torture people, yet they admit they are doing it. It is illegal for the government to deny people their judicial due process by taking people to secret prisons in foreign countries, but they admit they are doing it. Anyone who does not understand that American rights and freedoms, like the right to privacy and t are disappearing has their head in the sand.
America is no longer the "land of the free and home of the brave" and it is very much high time for everyone to start recognizing that fact and start speaking up. Trying to say that our government is not repressive enough or authoritarian enough to speak up about it is ridiculous. The people who were tortured and killed at Abu Ghraib and other places at the hands of our government would not find those words "frankly, insulting". They would say that those words are an understatement.
When people in America joke on a regular basis that if you say anything against the government that you might be sent to Guantanamo, and when our elected officials argue about whether or not repeatedly drowning someone and reviving them is torture, you can be pretty sure that we have crossed the line that divides a free state and an authoritarian state.
America's position does put it at the top of the shitlist, but that doesn't mean that it's only targeted because of its foreign policies.
Islamic fundamentalism is alive and well in Africa, and there's also fundamentalist and terrorist activity in Canada. Islamic fundamentalism is also a problem in Britain, Germany, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Spain, Italy and Australia.
Well, actually, yes.
You see, all of the jihad is based on demagougery exploiting various, mostly unrelated, real or imagined grievances in the Arab world, and aims at creation of violence and warfare towards all and any comers who are unlike the target audience via indoctrination, lies, manipulation of facts etc and so on. At the forefront of the movement are loudmouth morons who spew constant stream of anti-everything-non-fundamentalist-Islam invective and rouse various sociopaths to action, mostly via small arms warfare combined with improvised explosives, punctuated by suicidal bomb attacks and a very rare spectacular terrorist assault on foreign soil, which results in few thousand casualties per year on average.
On the other hand we have demagougery exploiting various, mostly unrelated, real or imagined grievances in of the xenophobic, supremacist white subsectuion of American society, which aims at creation of violence and warfare towards all and any comers who are unlike the target audience via indoctrination, lies, manipulation of facts etc and so on. At the forefront of the movement are loudmouth morons who spew constant stream of anti-everything-non-white-upper-class-Christainst invective and rouse various sociopaths to action, mostly via large scale warfare, aerial bombardment and wholesale occupation of foreign nations, exctrajudicial imprisonment in Gulags, torture etc, with hundreds of thousands of casualties in Iraq alone in a period of 4 years.
In other words, O'Reilly, Coulter, Malkin etc are the ideological equivalents of Osama and various pontificating radical Imams in their various Madrassas. The difference is that their spew is empirically proven to be capable of causing vastly more damage and casualties than that of all the modern jihadis combined so far.
Perheaps that will change when the Pakistani nukes change hands to Taliban or Al-Queda and O'Reilly and Osama will start competing on more even terms.
None of which of course helps the more sane part of the humanity which is likely to caught in the crossfire caused by the blowhard morons of the world.
My dream is that one day all of the most insane of the violence promoting demagouges like O'Reilley, Coulter and Osama are all caught, given flamethrowers or some such and sent to an uninhabited island to practice what they preach on each other, while the rest of the world goes on about making our lives better. The last one standing gets to own the island where his followers are all sent as a punishment to listen to his or her whining 24/7 for the rest of their short lives.