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AT&T Helped the NSA Spy On Internet Traffic
An anonymous reader writes: Newly disclosed NSA documents show that the agency gained access to billions of emails through a "highly collaborative" relationship with AT&T. The company provided access from 2003 to 2013, including technical assistance to carry out court orders permitting wiretapping. "The company installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its Internet hubs on American soil, far more than its similarly sized competitor, Verizon. And its engineers were the first to try out new surveillance technologies invented by the eavesdropping agency. One document reminds NSA officials to be polite when visiting AT&T facilities, noting, 'This is a partnership, not a contractual relationship.'" The new files don't indicate whether the partnership currently exists, but the government has been doing its best to keep corporate partnerships hidden. The article also notes that "In 2011, AT&T began handing over 1.1 billion domestic cellphone calling records a day to the N.S.A. after 'a push to get this flow operational prior to the 10th anniversary of 9/11,' according to an internal agency newsletter."
Home of the slave!
DUH!
of course ATT and the NSA have been working together i wouldn't surprised if they shared employees!
I remember when the technician in this article was being called out as paranoid and many did not believe it.
Unfortunately too true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Self Defense - A Human Right www.a-human-right.com
is this really news? wasnt it AT&T who we knew had a secret room in one of their buildings years ago??
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
NSA got access to everything, blah blah. The NSA is our new overlord and conscience. So I'm contrarian here and curious: what did AT&T get out of this?
Or are they just happy they can listen in to phone calls again way back when the (actual) operators supported party-lines across multiple families and literally did the dialing for you?
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For those of you too young to remember: a party line was a single shared telephone line spread across multiple houses where anyone could pick up the phone and hear a conversation that another family was having -- that's how it was designed; no single line per each room in a house but a single line shared between disparate houses.
If someone was calling, the ringtone (a clapper striking a physical bell attached to the phone) was a different pattern for each house so the correct person would know to pick up.
Speed-dial? Touch-tones? Rotary? Dial-tone? No, you flashed the hook to get the attention of the mostly-present operator and verbally told them the name or number to dial for you.
I've got a phone like that hanging in the kitchen. Unattached and unused for decades, of course, until I give in and pay for the "Twilight Zone" option.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
Of course AT&T had a choice, they could have gone to court. That would have stopped it right there. What could the NSA do, shut them down? And yes, this is news because the level of spying and complicity is even worse than previously reported. I am sure as more leaks come out, it will turn out to be far worse still.
The tech savvy crowd here at /. should be enraged that this is what our government is doing to the Internet. But maybe now that we have heard so much crap about what the government does that it just induces a yawn. I suppose that is a good thing for the NSA. I personally am outraged.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
Which pretty much makes it explicit that when the NSA comes to your CEO, they're rude, obnoxious and demanding. And you can't say no.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Room 641A is located in the SBC Communications building at 611 Folsom Street, San Francisco, three floors of which were occupied by AT&T before SBC purchased AT&T.[1] The room was referred to in internal AT&T documents as the SG3 [Study Group 3] Secure Room. It is fed by fiber optic lines from beam splitters installed in fiber optic trunks carrying Internet backbone traffic[3] and, as analyzed by J. Scott Marcus, a former CTO for GTE and a former adviser to the FCC, has access to all Internet traffic that passes through the building, and therefore "the capability to enable surveillance and analysis of internet content on a massive scale, including both overseas and purely domestic traffic."[4] Former director of the NSA's World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group, William Binney, has estimated that 10 to 20 such facilities have been installed throughout the United States.[2]
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Seems to me that datacaps facilitate the surveillance.
The published/public reasons for datacaps are to "reduce network congestion" and that various telcos would like to charge [gouge] their customers more money.
Many articles have debunked the "network congestion" argument. But, telcos would like to charge higher prices so they continue to float the myth ad naseum. It's also a great cover.
Maybe the only "congestion" is that while it would be relatively easy/inexpensive to build out networks to handle it [routers, etc.], it would be prohibitively more expensive to add the requisite amount of surveillance equipment to handle the load [if they could]. Otherwise, the "secret room" inside a telco's CO would have to become the "secret floor" and eventually the "secret building".
Charging customers higher prices for congestion is a misnomer. But, instead of using this capital [or any capital for that matter] to build out networks to accommodate legitimate internet traffic increases, like any reasonably/responsibly managed company, diverting it to a telco's "black budget" would be harder to justify [even internally] to an auditor.
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there
Yes, they could have refused all that wonderful government money. Not. It probably added 50% to the CEO's bonus over those years.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
We already knew from previous leaks that AT&T was the telecom most eagerly cooperative with the NSA.
What this underscores is just how eager they were, taking NSA dicks in all holes and begging for more, *splort*ing packets all over their faces. HLARGHARLARGH.
All completely illegal and unconstitutional, thanks Dubya for getting this rolling and thanks Obama for covering their asses after the rock was turned over.
The NSA wasn't "fucking the wife" and it really is a partnership. AT&T is a loyal corporate citizen and was doing its loyal patriotic duty. If you were AT&T, wouldn't you? Isn't the NSA and the rest of the state police apparatus there to protect AT&T and its class?
Trump up criminal charges and get the CEO of AT&T thrown into pound-me-in-the-ass Federal Prison, just like they did to the only telecom executive to refuse them. This ain't the bush leagues.
AT&T owes the government some favors. You may recall they were broken up into smaller companies in the 1980s. Well not long after AT&T quietly bought up nearly everything again. Don't think that went over without anyone noticing.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Of course AT&T had a choice, they could have gone to court. That would have stopped it right there. What could the NSA do, shut them down?
Well, the NSA/Government could cancel your government contracts, begin investigating you for insider trading, and jail your CEO for 6 years...
it was against the law to refuse the access
The Fugitive Slave Act made it against the law to help escaped slaves. The Reich Citizenship Law made Jews non-people with no rights. For both of those laws (and many others), people resisted, even though in some cases they risked death in doing so. If what your government is doing is morally wrong, saying that you were just following orders and had no choice isn't good enough...