Whistleblower outs NSA's secret spy room at AT&T April 08, 2006 Mark Klein, a retired AT&T communications technician, said the company shunted all Internet traffic--including traffic from peering links connecting to other Internet backbone providers-- to semantic traffic analyzers, installed in a secret room inside the AT&T central office on Folsom Street in San Francisco. Similar rooms were built in Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego. "Based on my understanding of the connections and equipment at issue, it appears the NSA (National Security Agency) is capable of conducting what amounts to vacuum-cleaner surveillance of all the data crossing the Internet," Klein said. "This potential spying appears to be applied wholesale to all sorts of Internet communications of countless citizens." In 2003, the National Security Agency set up a secret room inside the phone company's San Francisco office building that was not accessible to AT&T technicians, Klein said. The former employee's statement, as well as several documents saved by him after he left the company in 2004, shows further evidence of domestic spying initiatives by the federal government. Klein's statement is being incorporated into a class action filed in San Francisco federal court, in which lawyers with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Lerach Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins, and Traber & Voorhees in Pasadena claim that AT&T illegally allowed the NSA taps. "Despite what we are hearing, and considering the public track record of this administration, I simply do not believe their claims that the NSA's spying program is really limited to foreign communications or is otherwise consistent with the NSA's charter or with FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act]," Klein said. News that the NSA was working with major telecommunications companies first surfaced shortly before Christmas. The Bush administration has acknowledged the existence of a domestic spying program, but claims the executive order was limited to those individuals with known terrorist ties. The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T on January 31, 2006, accusing the telecom giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency in its massive program to wiretap and data-mine Americans' communications. "The evidence that we are filing supports our claim that AT&T is diverting Internet traffic into the hands of the NSA wholesale, in violation of federal wiretapping laws and the Fourth Amendment," EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston said in a statement. ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as eugen@leitl.org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]