Recently a former AT&T technician, Mark Klein has come forward to support the EFF's lawsuit against AT&T for its alleged complicity in the NSA's electronic surveillance. In addition to his public statements Mark has provided the EFF with internal AT&T documents related to their part of the NSA spying program.
AT&T now argues that these documents shouldn't be used as evidence in the case and should be returned. These documents reportly detail how AT&T diverts internet traffic to the National Security Agency and allege that in addition to San Francisco this activity occurs at other AT&T switching centers around the country.
AT&T does not argue that the documents are false however or forged. If anything AT&T's argument adds credibility to them. AT&T's lawyers told the court that press coverage surrounding the case, was revealing the company's trade secrets, "causing grave injury to AT&T." Helping the government spy is a trade secret?
They also argue that unsealing the documents "would cause AT&T great harm and potentially jeopardize AT&T's network, making it vulnerable to hackers, and worse." I suspect that's the least of their concerns though, it would also jeopardize ATT's customer base. Corporations have as much if not more to worry about having their electronic communications mined by the Bush Administration as everyday American's do. Imagine if you were a competitor of say, Haliburton and communications from your corporate network passed through one of these AT&T switching centers. The more attention this NSA spying issue gets the more inclusive the data collection appears. These documents could potentially reveal just how inclusive the internet side of the data mining operation is
Accordin to Klien, the NSA spying abilities were brought to you by the wonderful people at Narus according to Klein they manufacture the equipment being used to analyze the traffic. Narus's product information describes their 'lawful intercept' technology:
CALEA- and ETSI-compliant modules for lawful intercept featuring a robust warrant management system. Capabilities include playback of streaming media (for example, VoIP), rendering of Web pages, examination of e-mails and the ability to analyze the payload/attachments of e-mail or file transfer protocols.
Proprietary directed analysis monitoring and surveillance module offering seamless integration with the NSS or other DDoS, intrusion or anomaly detection systems, securely providing analysts with real-time, surgical targeting of suspect information (from flow to application to full packets).
The documents in question were filed by the EFF temporarily "under seal." The EFF has asked the court to unseal them for public access as soon as possible. The EFF has also filed for the court to order AT&T to stop cooperating with the NSA, since despite the media attention and the likelyhood that the entire operation is illegal this data mining/monitoring project is still in operation. AT&T is still merrily funneling your electronic communications to the NSA's Narus devices.
Full story is at Wired.
Klien's statement is also at Wired.
Information on Narus's Intercept product can be found here