Whistleblower outs NSA's secret spy room at AT&T

[EEkid at aol.com]

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.



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