Salon article on AT&T network monitoring

[James S. Tyre]

At 10:45 AM 6/26/2006 -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

>Quoting:
>
>   In a pivotal network operations center in metropolitan St. Louis, AT&T
>   has maintained a secret, highly secured room since 2002 where
>   government work is being conducted, according to two former AT&T
>   workers once employed at the center.
>
>http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/06/21/att_nsa/index_np.html


By coincidence, the day after that article appeared, we released the
(partially redacted) Declaration of J. Scott Marcus, our expert in
EFF's case against AT&T,
http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/att/marcus-decl-redact.pdf.  The Salon
reporter then followed with this piece,
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/06/23/internet_expert/index_np.html

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Law Offices of James S. Tyre          310-839-4114/310-839-4602(fax)
10736 Jefferson Blvd., #512               Culver City, CA 90230-4969
Co-founder, The Censorware Project             http://censorware.net
Policy Fellow, Electronic Frontier Foundation     http://www.eff.org


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Is the NSA spying on U.S. Internet traffic?
Salon exclusive: Two former AT&T employees say the telecom giant has
maintained a secret, highly secure room in St. Louis since 2002. Intelligence
experts say it bears the earmarks of a National Security Agency operation.

By Kim Zetter

Jun. 21, 2006 | In a pivotal network operations center in metropolitan St.
Louis, AT&T has maintained a secret, highly secured room since 2002 where
government work is being conducted, according to two former AT&T workers once
employed at the center.

In interviews with Salon, the former AT&T workers said that only government
officials or AT&T employees with top-secret security clearance are admitted to
the room, located inside AT&T's facility in Bridgeton. The room's tight
security includes a biometric "mantrap" or highly sophisticated double door,
secured with retinal and fingerprint scanners. The former workers say company
supervisors told them that employees working inside the room were "monitoring
network traffic" and that the room was being used by "a government agency."

The details provided by the two former workers about the Bridgeton room bear
the distinctive earmarks of an operation run by the National Security Agency,
according to two intelligence experts with extensive knowledge of the NSA and
its operations. In addition to the room's high-tech security, those
intelligence experts told Salon, the exhaustive vetting process AT&T workers
were put through before being granted top-secret security clearance points to
the NSA, an agency known as much for its intense secrecy as its technological
sophistication.

"It was very hush-hush," said one of the former AT&T workers. "We were told
there was going to be some government personnel working in that room. We were
told, 'Do not try to speak to them. Do not hamper their work. Do not impede
anything that they're doing.'"

The importance of the Bridgeton facility is its role in managing the "common
backbone" for all of AT&T's Internet operations. According to one of the
former workers, Bridgeton serves as the technical command center from which
the company manages all the routers and circuits carrying the company's
domestic and international Internet traffic. Therefore, Bridgeton could be
instrumental for conducting surveillance or collecting data.

If the NSA is using the secret room, it would appear to bolster recent
allegations that the agency has been conducting broad and possibly illegal
domestic surveillance and data collection operations authorized by the Bush
administration after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. AT&T's Bridgeton
location would give the NSA potential access to an enormous amount of Internet
data -- currently, the telecom giant controls approximately one-third of all
bandwidth carrying Internet traffic to homes and businesses across the United
States.

The nature of the government operation using the Bridgeton room remains
unknown, and could be legal. Aside from surveillance or data collection, the
room could conceivably house a federal law enforcement operation, a classified
research project, or some other unknown government operation.

The former workers, both of whom were approached by and spoke separately to
Salon, asked to remain anonymous because they still work in the
telecommunications industry. They both left the company in good standing.
Neither worked inside the secured room or has access to classified
information. One worked in AT&T's broadband division until 2003. The other
asked to be identified only as a network technician, and worked at Bridgeton
for about three years.

The disclosure of the room in Bridgeton follows assertions made earlier this
year by a former AT&T worker in California, Mark Klein, who revealed that the
company had installed a secret room in a San Francisco facility and
reconfigured its circuits, allegedly to help collect data for use by the
government. In detailed documents he provided to the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, Klein also alleged there were other secret rooms at AT&T
facilities in other U.S. cities.

NSA expert Matthew Aid, who has spent the last decade researching a
forthcoming three-volume history of the agency, said of the Bridgeton room:
"I'm not a betting man, but if I had to plunk $100 down, I'd say it's safe
that it's NSA." Aid told Salon he believes the secret room is likely part of
"what is obviously a much larger operation, or series of interrelated
operations" combining foreign intelligence gathering with domestic
eavesdropping and data collection.

"You're talking about a backbone for computer communications, and that's NSA,"
Russ Tice, a former high-level NSA intelligence officer, told Salon. Tice, a
20-year veteran of multiple U.S. intelligence agencies, worked for the NSA
until spring 2005. "Whatever is happening there with the security you're
talking about is a whole lot more closely held than what's going on with the
Klein case" in San Francisco, he said. (The San Francisco room is secured only
by a special combination lock, according to the Klein documents.)

Tice added that for an operation requiring access to routers and gateways,
"the obvious place to do it is right at the source."

In a statement provided to Salon, NSA spokesman Don Weber said: "Given the
nature of the work we do, it would be irresponsible to comment on actual or
alleged operational issues as it would give those wishing to do harm to the
United States insight that could potentially place Americans in danger;
therefore, we have no information to provide. However, it is important to note
that NSA takes its legal responsibilities seriously and operates within the
law."

Since last December, news reports have asserted that the NSA has conducted
warrantless spying on the phone and e-mail communications of thousands of
people inside the U.S., and has been secretly collecting the phone call
records of millions of Americans, using data provided by major
telecommunications companies, including AT&T. Such operations would represent
a fundamental shift in the NSA's secretive mission, which over the last three
decades is widely understood to have focused exclusively on collecting signals
intelligence from abroad.

The reported operations have sparked fierce protest by lawmakers and civil
liberties advocates, and have raised fundamental questions about the legality
of Bush administration policies, including their consequences for the privacy
rights of Americans. The Bush administration has acknowledged the use of
domestic surveillance operations since Sept. 11, 2001, but maintains they are
conducted within the legal authority of the presidency. Several cases
challenging the legality of the alleged spying operations are now pending in
federal court, including suits against the federal government, and AT&T, among
other telecom companies.

In a statement provided to Salon, AT&T spokesman Walt Sharp said: "If and when
AT&T is asked by government agencies for help, we do so strictly within the
law and under the most stringent conditions. Beyond that, we can't comment on
matters of national security."

According to the two former AT&T workers and the Klein documents, the room in
the pivotal Bridgeton facility was set up several months before the room in
San Francisco. According to the Klein documents, the work order for the San
Francisco room came from Bridgeton, suggesting that Bridgeton has a more
integral role in operations using the secured rooms.

The company's Bridgeton network operations center, where approximately 100
people work, is located inside a one-story brick building with a small
two-story addition connected to it. The building shares a parking lot with a
commercial business and is near an interstate highway.

According to the two former workers, the secret room is an internal structure
measuring roughly 20 feet by 40 feet, and was previously used by employees of
the company's WorldNet division. In spring 2002, they said, the company moved
WorldNet employees to a different part of the building and sealed up the room,
plastering over the window openings and installing steel double doors with no
handles for moving equipment in and out of the room. The company then
installed the high-tech mantrap, which has opaque Plexiglas-like doors that
prevent anyone outside the room from seeing clearly into the mantrap chamber,
or the room beyond it. Both former workers say the mantrap drew attention from
employees for being so high-tech.

Telecom companies commonly use mantraps to secure data storage facilities, but
they are typically less sophisticated, requiring only a swipe card to pass
through. The high-tech mantrap in Bridgeton seems unusual because it is
located in an otherwise low-key, small office building. Tice said it indicates
"something going on that's very important, because you're talking about an
awful lot of money" to pay for such security measures.

The vetting process for AT&T workers granted access to the room also points to
the NSA, according to Tice and Aid.

The former network technician said he knows at least three AT&T employees who
have been working in the room since 2002. "It took them six months to get the
top-security clearance for the guys," the network technician said. "Although
they work for AT&T, they're actually doing a job for the government." He said
that each of them underwent extensive background checks before starting their
jobs in the room. The vetting process included multiple polygraph tests,
employment history reviews, and interviews with neighbors and school
instructors, going as far back as elementary school.

Aid said that type of vetting is precisely the kind NSA personnel who receive
top-secret SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information) clearance go through.
"Everybody who works at NSA has an SCI clearance," said Aid.

It's possible the Bridgeton room is being used for a federal law enforcement
operation. According to the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act
of 1994, telecom companies are required to assist law enforcement officials
who have legal authorization to conduct electronic surveillance, either in
pursuit of criminal suspects or for the protection of national security. The
companies must design or modify their systems to make such surveillance
possible, essentially by making them wiretap-ready.

The FBI is the primary federal agency that tracks and apprehends terrorist
suspects within the U.S. Yet, there are several indications that the Bridgeton
room does not involve the FBI.

"The FBI, which is probably the least technical agency in the U.S. government,
doesn't use mantraps," Aid said. "But virtually every area of the NSA's
buildings that contain sensitive operations require you to go through a
mantrap with retinal and fingerprint scanners. All of the sensitive offices in
NSA buildings have them." The description of the opaque Plexiglas-like doors
in Bridgeton, Aid said, indicates that the doors are likely infused with
Kevlar for bulletproofing -- another signature measure that he said is used to
secure NSA facilities: "You could be inside and you can't kick your way out.
You can't shoot your way out. Even if you put plastique explosives, all you
could do is blow a very small hole in that opaque glass."

Jameel Jaffer, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union's
national security program, said it is unlikely that the FBI would set up an
ongoing technical operation -- in this case, for several years running --
inside a room of a telecommunications company. The Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, passed by Congress in 1978, requires law enforcement
officials to obtain warrants from a secret federal court for domestic
surveillance operations involving the protection of national security. If the
FBI (or another federal agency) wanted data, it would more likely be targeting
a specific individual or set of individuals suspected of engaging in criminal
or terrorist activities. The agency would obtain a warrant and then call AT&T,
or show up in person with the warrant and ask for the wiretap to be engaged.
According to Jaffer, the FBI, NSA or any other federal agency could also
legally tap into communications data under federal guidelines using technical
means that would not require technical assistance of a telecom company.

In an e-mail statement to Salon, FBI spokesperson Paul Bresson said: "The FBI
does not confirm whether or not we are involved in an alleged ongoing
operational activity. In all cases, FBI operations are conducted in strict
accordance with established Department of Justice guidelines, FBI policy, and
the law."

Rather than specifically targeted surveillance, it is also possible that the
Bridgeton room is being used for a classified government project, such as data
mining, with which the Pentagon has experimented in the past. Data mining uses
automated methods to search through large volumes of data, looking for
patterns that might help identify terrorist suspects, for example. According
to Tice, private sector employees who work on classified government projects
for the NSA are required to undergo the same kind of top-secret security
clearance that AT&T workers in the Bridgeton room underwent.

According to the former network technician, all three AT&T employees he knows
who work inside the room have network technician and administration
backgrounds -- not research backgrounds -- suggesting that those workers are
only conducting maintenance or technical operations inside the room.

Furthermore, Tice said it is much more likely that any classified project
using data collected via a corporate facility would take place in separate
facilities: "The information that you garner from something like a room
siphoning information and filtering it would be sent to some place where you'd
have people thinking about what to do with that data," he said.

Dave Farber, a respected computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and
former chief technologist for the Federal Communications Commission, also said
it is likely that data collected in a facility like the Bridgeton center would
be used elsewhere, once the facility is set up to divert the data. "If I own
the routers, I can put code in there to have them monitor for certain data.
That's not a particularly difficult job," said Farber, who is considered one
of the pioneers of Internet architecture. Farber said that "packets" of data
can essentially be copied and then sent to some other location for use. "Most
of the problems would have to do with keeping your staff from knowing too much
about it."

According to the former network technician, workers at Bridgeton, at the
direction of government officials, could conceivably collect data using any
AT&T router around the country, which he says number between 1,500 and 2,000.
To do so, the company would need to install a wiretap-like device at select
locations for "sniffing" the desired data. That could explain the purpose of
the San Francisco room divulged by Klein, as well as the secret rooms he
alleged existed at AT&T facilities in other U.S. cities.

"The network sniffer with the right software can capture anything," the former
network technician said. "You can get people's e-mail, VoIP phone calls,
[calls made over the Internet] -- even passwords and credit card transactions
-- as long as you have the right software to decrypt that."

In theory, surveillance involving Internet communications can be executed
legally under federal law. "But with most of these things," Farber said, "the
problem is that it just takes one small step to make it illegal."


New light on NSA spying
A former Internet expert for the FCC concludes that a secret AT&T installation
was most likely used for government surveillance.

By Kim Zetter

Jun. 23, 2006 | A federal court in California released a previously sealed
40-page document on Thursday in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit
against AT&T, which bolsters allegations that the telecommunications giant
built secret rooms to allow the National Security Agency to conduct widespread
surveillance of Internet traffic. The document also paints a detailed scenario
of how the NSA may be conducting the top-secret operation, which closely
matches information given to Salon by a former AT&T employee who worked at the
company's network operations center in Bridgeton, Mo.

The document, a statement by J. Scott Marcus, a former senior advisor for
Internet technology to the Federal Communications Commission, was filed under
seal on April 5 on behalf of the EFF to support its class-action suit against
AT&T, which alleges that the company violated a number of federal laws in
aiding the government's domestic spying operation against AT&T customers. The
court sealed the document because it contained proprietary AT&T information,
then ordered AT&T and EFF to work together to produce a redacted version to
place in the public record, which they did on Thursday.

EFF asked Marcus to examine records from a former AT&T technician in
California named Mark Klein that describe how AT&T reconfigured its network in
San Francisco and installed special computer systems in a secret room,
allegedly to divert and collect Internet traffic to help the NSA conduct
warrantless surveillance. Were the records authentic and was it feasible that
they described a government surveillance program, or could the reconfiguration
and systems have been put in place for more innocuous uses?

Marcus concludes in his statement that the documents are authentic and, after
considering a number of possible reasons for the reconfiguration -- such as
legitimate network monitoring and maintenance -- writes that the system AT&T
installed in a secret San Francisco room, and likely other cities, was
"exceptionally well suited to a massive, distributed surveillance activity"
and that "no other application provides as good an explanation for the
combination of engineering choices that were made."

He considered that the system might be set up to accommodate lawful traffic
intercepts under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, but
deemed this not a credible scenario, since there are far simpler and less
expensive solutions for meeting CALEA, which required Internet service
providers to make their networks wiretap-ready. He also concludes that given
how cash strapped AT&T was in 2002 and 2003 when the expensive changes and
additions to the system were made, it is "exceedingly unlikely" that AT&T
financed the project on its own. "I therefore conclude that it is highly
probable that funding came from an outside source, and consider the U.S.
Government to be the most likely source," he writes in the document.

Over several pages that are redacted at key points, Marcus discusses technical
details in the Klein documents that have previously been unavailable. (The
Klein documents are under seal, and although some of them have made it to the
Internet, others, judging by details revealed by Marcus, have never been made
public.) According to Marcus, the Klein documents refer to a "private ...
backbone network, which appears to partition from AT&T's main Internet
backbone." This suggests the presence of a private network, Marcus writes,
whose existence is "not consistent with normal AT&T practice."

"The most plausible inference is that this was a covert network that was used
to ship data of interest to one or more central locations for still more
intensive analysis," Marcus writes.

The most interesting aspect of the Marcus statement is the clear, though
speculative, scenario he provides for how the National Security Agency is
likely conducting its surveillance and data collection through that network.
Marcus, currently a consultant with WIK-Consult GmbH in Bad Honnef, Germany,
was unavailable for comment. But in the statement, he suggests that the secret
San Francisco room is connected to two separate networks -- the regular
commercial network on which e-mail, Web surfing and voice-over Internet
Protocol traffic runs, and the second private, covert network that is
partitioned off from the regular network and is used to divert traffic that
has been copied and sent back to a central collection place. He suggests that
massive amounts of data are collected at 15 to 20 locations around the
country, where it is automatically screened and winnowed down to only "data of
interest" by a special system installed in San Francisco (and likely
elsewhere) before it is shipped off to one or two central collection points,
where it is processed by powerful computers and analyzed by skilled staff.

This agrees with what several sources told Salon this week. A former AT&T
network technician who is well acquainted with AT&T's common backbone and
asked to remain anonymous, told Salon about a secret, heavily secured room
located in AT&T's Bridgeton facility, where the company runs its technical
command center from which it manages all of its backbone. From that facility,
the company could send commands to any of its 1,500 to 2,000 routers around
the country to filter and divert traffic from those locations. To do that, the
technician said, AT&T would need to physically place network "sniffers" at key
points in the company's backbone. "There are 10 or 15 data centers located in
major cities around the country," he said. "So they would need to stick [a
sniffer] in each of those data centers to capture all the information." Then
the company could easily send commands from the Bridgeton room to the routers
in those locations. The commands would indicate what data to collect and where
to divert it afterward.

Marcus writes that although the configuration in San Francisco was deployed in
early 2003, given AT&T processes, the planning for it was probably underway
six to 12 months earlier. This coincides with the timing of the Bridgeton
Network Operation Center, which was put in place about eight months before the
San Francisco room was configured and was the place from which the work order
for the secret room in San Francisco originated.

The Bridgeton room, guarded with a high-tech mantrap with retinal and
fingerprint scanners, is restricted to government workers and AT&T employees
with top-secret security clearances and is likely just used for remotely
monitoring and maintaining the secret rooms around the country and sending
commands. Russ Tice, a former NSA officer and senior analyst until last year,
told Salon that the data once collected is probably not sent to Bridgeton but
instead is diverted to an NSA facility where powerful processing equipment can
analyze it.

As for the kind of data collected, Marcus infers from the Klein documents that
the configuration in place in San Francisco would enable surveillance of "both
overseas and purely domestic traffic." But the Klein evidence suggests that
only "off net" traffic was being collected in San Francisco at the time the
documents were written. "Off net" refers to traffic sent between AT&T
customers and customers of other ISPs; "on net" traffic is sent strictly
between one AT&T customer and another AT&T customer.

Still, this amounts to a lot of data, Marcus says. It would mean that any
traffic that passed through AT&T's network from another ISP or network would
be intercepted. He suggests the possibility, however, that authorities could
conceivably weed out domestic traffic to collect only international traffic
exchanged between an AT&T customer and noncustomer, given that software
programs exist that can help distinguish domestic Internet traffic from
traffic that travels from outside the United States. But he writes that even
with such weeding, some purely domestic traffic would likely slip through the
filter.

A hearing on the EFF lawsuit against AT&T is being held in San Francisco
Friday to determine whether the case should be thrown out. The Department of
Justice has interfered in the case, calling on the court to dismiss it on
grounds that national security secrets would be exposed if a trial were to
proceed.


--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
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