Wired News did what a San Francisco judge would not, bring to light the existence of evidence implicating AT&T's cooperation in setting up virtual "secret rooms" from which the NSA could access every single message sent on the Internet. The official documents remain sealed, as do many particulars, but the emergence of a former AT&T technician, Mark Klein, brings new evidence to the fore to support the lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against the communications giant.
Related links:
- Wired's reasoning behind the publishing of AT&T's internal documents
AT&T claims information in the file is proprietary and that it would suffer severe harm if it were released.
Based on what we've seen, Wired News disagrees. In addition, we believe the public's right to know the full facts in this case outweighs AT&T's claims to secrecy.
- Ryan Singel's article for Wired, Stumbling Into a Spy Scandal
One of the documents appears to describe AT&T's successful efforts to tap into 16 fiber-optic cables connecting the company's WorldNet internet backbone to other internet service providers.
- Mark Klein's full statement (pdf)
I wrote the following document in 2004 when it became clear to me that AT&T, at the behest of the National Security Agency, had illegally installed secret computer gear designed to spy on internet traffic. At the time I thought this was an outgrowth of thenotorious “Total Information Awareness” program which was attacked by defenders ofcivil liberties. But now it’s been revealed by the New York Times that the spying program is vastly bigger and was directly authorized by president Bush, as he himself has nowadmitted, in flagrant violation of specific statutes and Constitutional protections for civilliberties. I am presenting this information to facilitate the dismantling of this dangerous Orwellian project.
1 Comment
May 23, 2006 at 2:44 am
[...] More light shed on the NSA/AT&T privacy dust-up described in our last post. Business Week is reporting how the telcos get around the illegality of purchasing commercial telecommunications records and not disclosing thier use. Buying commercially collected data allows the government to dodge certain privacy rules. The Privacy Act of 1974 restricts how federal agencies may use such information and requires disclosure of what the government is doing with it. But the law applies only when the government is doing the data collecting. [...]