Suspicion that AT&T was enabling NSA surveillance dates back beyond a 2006 class-action lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation alleging AT&T’s collaboration with the NSA in illegal programs to wiretap and collect data from Americans’ communications and the revelation of the existence of Room 641A of AT&T (SBC Communications) Folsom Street location in San Francisco.
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Telecoms provider AT&T has been helping the US National Security Agency conduct surveillance on Internet traffic, according to the New York Times. AT&T has given the spy agency access to billions of emails as they have flowed across its domestic networks, and the telco installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its Internet hubs on American soil, far more than Verizon (NYSE: VZ), the report said.
AT&T reportedly provided to the NSA “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”.
The report, done in conjunction with a report from ProPublica, was based on documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Sowden and cited an internal agency newsletter for the information on the cell phone records.
“These documents not only further confirm our claims in Jewel, but convincingly demolish the government’s core response-that EFF cannot prove that AT&T’s facilities were used in the mass surveillance”, said EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn.
“We don’t comment on matters of national security”, an AT&T spokesman told the NYT.
NSA protocols call for agents to exercise maximum courtesy in their dealings with the corporations, on the grounds that US intelligence ties to the corporations constitute “a partnership, not a contractual relationship”.
This is something we’ve already had time to digest.
The documents show that AT&T’s cooperation has involved a broad range of classified activities, according to the Times.
It’s unclear how the reports might affect AT&T and customers’ perceptions of the carrier.
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As made clear by the revelations on AT&T’s role in collaborating with the NSA, this amounts to little more than changing the name of the sign on the door, since the telecommunications firms essentially function as extensions of the spy apparatus. While it stands to reason that the two entities are still working together in some capacity, the documents provided by Snowden only cover a period ranging from 2003 through 2013. In June of this year, the White House backed passage of the USA Freedom Act, which purported to end only one of the many programs that have been set up to spy on the population of the United States and the world: the metadata phone records program.
