* * * AT&T Documents Unsealed - W's warrantless wiretapping of 10% of all internet traffic!
Animated GIF Man
A civil liberties group suing telecom giant AT&T for allegedly installing
illegal secret surveillance rooms in its internet facilities at the behest of
the National Security Agency published substantial portions of long-sealed case
documents Tuesday.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit, filed in January 2006, relies
partly on documents provided to the group by Mark Klein, a former AT&T
technician who took three documents home with him when he retired in 2004. Those
documents have been under seal in a San Francisco federal court. Wired News and
other news organizations sought unsuccessfully to have them unsealed earlier
this year.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/02/spy_docs_stay_s.html
However, this week AT&T acceded to the documents' partial disclosure after the
EFF threatened to take the matter of their sealing to a federal appeals court.
Portions of the sealed documents had been published by Wired News in May of 2006
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/05/70944
and more recently by the PBS news program Frontline.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/05/frontline_inves.html
AT&T agreed to the disclosure of those portions to escape the embarrassment of
arguing that documents available on the internet for more than a year were
secret, according to Cindy Cohn, the EFF's legal director.
AT&T declined to comment on the disclosure.
There are no surprises in the AT&T documentation published Tuesday, which
consist of a subset of the pages already published by Wired News. They include
AT&T wiring diagrams, equipment lists and task orders that appear to show the
company tapping into fiber-optic cables at the point where its backbone network
connects to other ISPs at a San Francisco switching office. The documents appear
to show the company siphoning off the traffic to a room packed with
internet-monitoring gear.
Released along with the AT&T documents is a formerly sealed signed declaration
from Klein, and a written analysis of the documents penned by internet expert J.
Scott Marcus, which have been kept mostly under wraps by a court order that
applied to the parties in the case.
The interpretation of Klein's documents by Marcus, a former CTO for GTE and a
former adviser to the FCC, are the most interesting documents released Tuesday.
"This configuration appears to have the capability to enable surveillance and
analysis of internet content on a massive scale, including both overseas and
purely domestic traffic," Marcus wrote.
AT&T likely has 15 to 20 of these rooms around the country, and shipped data out
of the rooms via a separate network to another location, Marcus concluded.
Collectively, he estimated that the rooms were able to keep tabs on some 10
percent of the nation's purely domestic internet traffic.
The document release comes as AT&T, the EFF and the government prepare to battle
in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in August, where the government and
AT&T seek overturn a lower court order allowing the case to proceed toward
trial.
The government argues that the case must be thrown out since it involves
national security matters, while AT&T says it can't defend itself without
spilling classified information. Federal district court Judge Vaughn Walker
ruled last July that the case could proceed
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/07/71432
because President Bush has admitted the existence of the NSA's warrantless
wiretapping of Americans' overseas communications.
"Dismissing this case at the outset would sacrifice liberty for no apparent
enhancement of security," Walker wrote.
Cohn says she hopes the new documents will illustrate to the public that the
organization's case is grounded in fact, and that the government's argument that
national security is at risk is overstated.
"It really paints them into a corner, how unreasonable their claims of state
secrets are," Cohn said. "I'm hoping (the document release) demonstrates we are
right and know what we are talking about and that we don't need much more to win
our case. We are much closer than people think."
AT&T declined comment, except to issue this official oft-repeated statement on
the case: "AT&T is fully committed to protecting our customers' privacy. We do
not comment on matters of national security."
In a court filing, the company's lawyers called Wired News a "scofflaw" for
publishing the documents last year.
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/06/71146
--
Bob Hare Jr aka Animated GIF Man
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