Documents Confirming AT&T Had Close Ties With NSA Draw Advocate Criticism
Privacy advocates said that newly leaked NSA documents confirm their fears: AT&T closely cooperated with the agency, in many cases when it wasn't required to by law. The revelations may bolster the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals against the NSA on behalf of several AT&T customers, said EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn in an interview Monday. Retired AT&T technician Mark Klein, who worked there for 22 1/2 years before contacting EFF in 2006, told us that what the NSA documents show involved tapping into Internet data flows via AT&T fiber optic cables.
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AT&T worked closely with the NSA for decades, allowing the agency to capture millions of Internet records, according to documents released by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, The New York Times and ProPublica jointly reported this weekend. But EFF was unsuccessful in its suit over that close cooperation, which was first alleged by Klein. "The documents prove I was right,” Klein said. “If a court had been willing to allow the Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit against AT&T to go forward, we would have won.” What is "remarkable about these revelations is how amazingly consistent they are” with what EFF initially claimed, Cohn said.
Word of AT&T’s relationship with the NSA, called the Fairview program, prompted renewed calls to end such surveillance. Authorities granted by executive order 12333, which establishes the overall framework for U.S. intelligence activities (see 1504080024), have to be re-examined, NSA whistleblower William Binney said. He added that Section 215 of the Patriot Act and Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act are scapegoats for the real issue -- EO 12333, which was enacted by Ronald Reagan. Cohn said she thinks it’s time for the government to “come clean” and that it would “especially help” EFF’s case if the government admits its involvement in domestic electronic surveillance. The government claimed surveillance of only wireline services has occurred, but Cohn said she heard the NSA collected wireless data, too.
AT&T denied any wrongdoing. “We do not provide information to any investigating authorities without a court order or other mandatory process other than if a person’s life is in danger and time is of the essence,” a spokesperson said. “For example, in a kidnapping situation we could provide help tracking down called numbers to assist law enforcement.”
Binney said AT&T has had more of a relationship with the NSA than other telecom providers, including Verizon. NSA’s relationship with Verizon, called the Stormbrew program, focused more on foreign contacts, as evidenced by tap points existing predominantly on the coasts, Binney said. AT&T’s tap points are spread out throughout the population, proving it’s a domestic surveillance program, he said. Verizon didn't comment.
Klein said he knew AT&T collaborated with the NSA but didn’t know the details until 2003, when he was assigned to a new office and discovered engineering documents showing that at AT&T’s data center in San Francisco, there was a room that fiber optic lines went into. Binney said the NSA has the fiber pass into its room to ensure the information and its activities are classified. Only those with NSA clearances were allowed in, Klein said. “Regular techs like myself didn’t have authorization.” The NSA swept up “basically everything on the Internet,” Klein said. “Not just email, but Web browsing, pictures, whatever goes across the Internet.”
Some said Americans even have begun to feel acclimated to a surveillance state. “Most people don’t seem to care,” said Rutherford Institute President John Whitehead. In a post on the Lawfare blog Sunday, Brown University visiting scholar Timothy Edgar said the latest Snowden revelation isn’t news because there are only three major American telecom providers. Finding proof that AT&T was the provider with the coziest relationship with the NSA is a “dog-bites-man story, if ever there was one,” he said.
The NSA has sworn it collected information to protect the American public, but the agency has failed to prevent major attacks, including the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and the Boston Marathon bombing, even though it had the information, Klein said. Management is telling the public that the intelligence community has to collect all of the data, but the analysts, those who actually do the job, have said for years there is too much data and they can’t figure out what’s going on from it, Binney said.
Some also said the latest document leak shows more laws need changing, even after Congress passed the USA Freedom Act and President Barack Obama signed it into law in June. “USA Freedom [Act] was just for show, to pretend to reform something,” Klein said. The law does nothing about the secret rooms such as he observed at AT&T where it fed data to the NSA -- all it does is address the phone metadata collection programs, Klein said. Whitehead agreed the law was “a bunch of a hullaballoo.”
“The first rule of Internet security is that there is no Internet security," cryptographer and John Hopkins University professor Matthew Green said in a blog post Sunday. “There is no way to ensure that your packets will be routed as you want them, and there's absolutely no way to ensure that they won't be looked at,” Green said. “Even if you're not inclined to view the NSA as an adversary -- and contrary to public perception, that view is not uniform even inside Silicon Valley -- America is hardly [home to] the only intelligence agency capable of subverting the global communications network."