Neither AT&T nor Verizon were specifically named in the documents, but reporters at the Times and ProPublica revealed in detail the methodology that they used to ascertain the identities of the two companies. The astonishing relationship between the National Security Agency and the telecoms company goes far beyond any sort of arrangement or co-operation that came from other firms.
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According to documents provided to the New York Times and ProPublica by Edward Snowden, AT&T and the NSA have maintained for decades a “highly collaborative” relationship that has facilitated the government agency’s ability to spy on enormous quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States. “And its engineers were the first to try out new surveillance technologies invented by the eavesdropping agency”. AT&T’s “extreme willingness to help” is praised by the NSA – hardly surprising considering the collaboration gave the NSA access to billions of email sent over AT&T’s network.
The first of the cache of documents leaked by Snowden appeared in the Guardian. And in 2012, the Fairview program carried out the court order for surveillance on the Internet line, which AT&T provides, serving the United Nations headquarters. Perhaps worst of all is an NSA memo advising employees about to visit the company to be nice because “this is a partnership, not a contractual relationship”. Several old surveillance programs are referred to in the documents including one dating back to 1985 called Fairview. We still don’t know, but one of the documents in this new collection says the NSA was authorized to conduct “full-take access”, and that the amount of data was so large that it flooded the NSA’s technical capability unless a “robust filtering mechanism” was put in place.
In 2013, AT&T refused to share with stockholders information about its cooperation with U.S. intelligence services, saying it was not required to disclose what it did with customers’ data. Because AT&T operates such a large portion of the country’s internet and cell phone accounts, it’s no secret that the company is a particularly important source of information for the NSA.
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The report notes that AT&T is never mentioned by name in any of the documents, having it replaced with a special codename.
