Investigation Shows AT&T Really Likes Being In The Surveillance Business

from the Ma-Spy-and-the-Baby-Spies dept

The Intercept has dug up more details on AT&T's groundbreaking efforts in worldwide surveillance. Last year, it identified a 550-foot, windowless tower in lower Manhattan as an AT&T hub where the NSA taps into phone calls, faxes, and internet communications.

According to The Intercept's investigation, there are eight of these datacenters/hubs scattered around the United States. And the NSA is utilizing these to grab data and communications from all over the world. Like the one in Manhattan, the other AT&T/NSA structures are structurally hardened, largely devoid of windows, and bristling with communications equipment... not all of it belonging to AT&T.

Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. In each of these cities, The Intercept has identified an AT&T facility containing networking equipment that transports large quantities of internet traffic across the United States and the world. A body of evidence – including classified NSA documents, public records, and interviews with several former AT&T employees – indicates that the buildings are central to an NSA spying initiative that has for years monitored billions of emails, phone calls, and online chats passing across U.S. territory.

This isn't just a collection of AT&T customers' communications. Its partnerships with other telcos and internet providers allows the NSA to harvest communications from a variety of service providers. These eight locations are "backbones," which means almost everything being carried by AT&T flows through at least one of these centers. Former AT&T employees interviewed by The Intercept indicate there has been a concerted effort made by AT&T to ensure the NSA has access to as much data and communications as possible.

"I worked with all of them," said Philip Long, who was employed by AT&T for more than two decades as a technician servicing its networks. Long's work with AT&T was carried out mostly in California, but he said his job required him to be in contact with the company's other facilities across the U.S. In about 2005, Long recalled, he received orders to move "every internet backbone circuit I had in northern California" through the San Francisco AT&T building identified by The Intercept as one of the eight NSA spy hubs. Long said that, at the time, he felt suspicious of the changes, because they were unusual and unnecessary. "We thought we were routing our circuits so that they could grab all the data," he said. "We thought it was the government listening."

Former employee Mark Klein claimed the NSA installed its own equipment at some of the hubs several years ago. Those interviewed by the Intercept confirm this, pointing out that some hubs proactively made copies of everything flowing through these centers for the surveillance agency. Most of what's harvested avoids the oversight of the FISA court by being obtained under Executive Order 12333. This Reagan directive granted "transit" authority, allowing the NSA to intercept foreign communications as they traversed hubs located in the United States.

As The Intercept points out, this collection has run into trouble in the FISA court. Even though AT&T apparently deploys filters to sort communications by originating IP addresses to remove as many domestic communications as possible, the NSA was still able to scoop up plenty of US persons' communications. This led to a ruling by the FISA court ordering the NSA to fix the program or shut it down. It chose to "fix" it, which involved nothing more than tossing up a warning on analysts' screens that the haystacks they were perusing contained domestic communications, warning them to "not read" the communications of non-target US persons. This worked about as well as you would expect, leading to a neverending string of "compliance incidents" that somehow managed to fall outside the generous coverage granted to the agency with the 2008 FISA Amendments Act.

This latest revelation isn't going to undermine AT&T's "Death Star" reputation. The company is awful on so many levels (routinely terrible customer service, supervillainistic behavior) that finding out it's carrying on a nationwide relationship with the NSA is hardly a surprise. But we should expect more from the companies we trust with our data and communications. We need companies that play hard-to-get, not those that immediately assume compromising positions the moment the government hints it wants to be deep inside them.

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Filed Under: mass surveillance, nsa, surveillance
Companies: at&t


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  1. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 27 Jun 2018 @ 1:09pm

    We do expect more, which is why no one should trust their data to a company with as bad a reputation as AT&T. Sadly, due to grossly inadequate broadband construction, there's often no way to ensure the traffic stays on trusted circuits.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 27 Jun 2018 @ 2:17pm

    Re:

    When the government is trying to capture everything, even breakable encryption gets in their way, as it requires computing power to deal with. It is a scale thing, as while 1 second of a cpu core per message to decrypt is no problem if you are dealing with a few messages, but when there are tens of millions of messages a second or more to decrypt, even a few milliseconds a message require massive computing power to keep up with the traffic, and if you cannot keep up, the backlog grows rapidly.

    The hazard is they have past messages to try and read if they become interested in you.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    Clawsen Hurley, 27 Jun 2018 @ 2:44pm

    consenting adults

    AT&T to the NSA; do me daddy! Harder, faster!

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 27 Jun 2018 @ 4:17pm

    So no one remembers Carnivore, Predator, or Echelon programs? This crap has been going on since at least the 70's. It started with POTs, and just morphed to keep up with newer tech. Email, cell phones Voip, etc.

    Nothing new here.

    Next week: Someone rediscovers TCPA / Palladium

    link to this | view in thread ]

  5. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 27 Jun 2018 @ 7:10pm

    This explains the slow downs that occur without reason... I remmeber having faster access with my dialup years ago.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  6. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 27 Jun 2018 @ 7:12pm

    Re: Re:

    but they will find the logs that are interesting to them and put more effort into those.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  7. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 27 Jun 2018 @ 8:00pm

    Re:

    Try I.T.T. in the 1930's with the first transatlantic telegraph. Incidentally they worked for both sides during the second world war.

    The importance of the issue is inversely proportional to the volume of debate. Which is why everybody is talking about Trump.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  8. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 27 Jun 2018 @ 10:22pm

    2016 is not last year ;)

    link to this | view in thread ]

  9. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 27 Jun 2018 @ 11:35pm

    Re: consenting adults

    more likely AT&T to the citizenry

    link to this | view in thread ]

  10. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 28 Jun 2018 @ 3:23am

    The real question is: What is AT&T getting in return for going out of their way to accommodate spying on private citizens?

    link to this | view in thread ]

  11. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 28 Jun 2018 @ 5:40am

    Re: Re: Re:

    So establish a regular communication schedule of fixed length messages, where the contents most of the time, and as padding can be anything, but preferably comes from a random source. That way they cannot detect when your are actively communicating or use cadence changes as a warning that you are about to do something, legal or illegal. Encrypt everything, which means they may well end up expending resource trying to decode data from a real random source,

    link to this | view in thread ]

  12. icon
    mhajicek (profile), 28 Jun 2018 @ 7:28am

    Re:

    I suspect that the board members and their families get to live.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  13. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 28 Jun 2018 @ 10:04am

    Re: Re:

    The board members of competitors—who still work with the NSA, but not so eagerly—are still alive. AT&T are likely getting lots of billable time, contracts, and other government favors.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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