Ride the Lightning

AT&T Assisted NSA in Vast Internet Spying

August 17, 2015

The New York Times reported Saturday that the NSA's ability "to spy on vast quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States has relied on its extraordinary, decades-long partnership with a single company: the telecom giant AT&T."

While that has long been suspected, newly disclosed NSA documents describe the relationship with the company as “highly collaborative,” while another lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.”

AT&T’s cooperation has involved a broad range of classified activities, according to the documents, which date from 2003 to 2013. AT&T has given the NSA access, through several methods covered under different legal rules, to billions of e-mails as they have flowed across its domestic networks. It provided technical assistance in carrying out a secret court order permitting the wiretapping of all Internet communications at the United Nations headquarters, a customer of AT&T.

While we don't know precisely how much AT&T (and Verizon) may be collaborating with the NSA today, it is clear that the NSA had pretty much unfettered access. To no one's surprise, the NSA, AT&T and Verizon declined to discuss the findings, with an AT&T spokesman saying, "We don't comment on matters of national security."

The article sets forth a lot of specifics about the programs known as Fairview (which appears to have involved AT&T) and Stormbrew (which appears to have involved Verizon and MCI, which Verizon later purchased). In 2011, AT&T began handing over 1.1 billion domestic cellphone calling records a day to the NSA. This revelation is striking because after Edward Snowden disclosed the program of collecting the records of Americans’ phone calls, intelligence officials told reporters that, for technical reasons, it consisted mostly of landline phone records.

It appears that we were once again misled. Disinformation appears to be a required course for federal intelligence officials.

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