Have you seen the
creepy new ad from the newly combined AT&T and DirecTV, "bringing your television and wireless together, taking entertainment to places you never imagined"? With the news broken over the weekend by the
New York Times and ProPublica that AT&T has been the
NSA's most willing partner in domestic spying for decades—long before 9/11—people who have DirecTV might want to make sure the "smart" features of their new flatscreen TVs are turned off. AT&T's participation in the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping scheme to collect American's phone class became public in 2005. Subsequent information from the Edward Snowden leaks showed that it went beyond phone data to the internet, and now we know that AT&T's "partnership" with the NSA goes back to the 1980s.
One document described it as “highly collaborative,” while another lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.”
AT&T’s cooperation has involved a broad range of classified activities, according to the documents, which date from 2003 to 2013. AT&T has given the NSA access, through several methods covered under different legal rules, to billions of emails as they have flowed across its domestic networks. It provided technical assistance in carrying out a secret court order permitting the wiretapping of all Internet communications at the United Nations headquarters, a customer of AT&T.
The NSA’s top-secret budget in 2013 for the AT&T partnership was more than twice that of the next-largest such program, according to the documents. The company installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its Internet hubs on American soil, far more than its similarly sized competitor, Verizon. And its engineers were the first to try out new surveillance technologies invented by the eavesdropping agency.
One document reminds NSA officials to be polite when visiting AT&T facilities, noting: “This is a partnership, not a contractual relationship.”
The program with AT&T, called Fairview, has been confirmed by former intelligence officials. It began back in 1985, "the year after antitrust regulators broke up the Ma Bell telephone monopoly and its long-distance division became AT&T Communications." These new documents date to 2013. It's not clear now how much of the operation—and particularly whether the NSA is still spying on the UN—is still operative. But in 2012 a Fairview operation carried out a secret court order for surveillance on the UN headquarter's internet line, a line provided by AT&T.
The early start AT&T had in working with the NSA meant that they were "the first partner to turn on a new collection capability that the NSA said amounted to a 'live' presence on the global net." Beginning in September 2003, the company forwarded 400 billion Internet metadata records to the NSA, along with "more than one million emails a day to the keyword selection system." Then in 2011, in what the NSA was calling internally "a push to get this flow operational prior to the tenth anniversary of 9/11," AT&T began providing over 1.1 billion domestic cellphone calling records a day. As the report points out, this is in direct contradiction of what intelligence officials said right after the initial Snowden disclosures—that for technical reasons, most of the data that was collected came from landlines.
It gets better. Through peer networks, AT&T has been providing information from other companies' networks, too. Not that those peer networks are blameless. Verizon in particular has been a willing accomplice as well, though not quite as long as AT&T. Another program revealed in this document release is Stormbrew, the NSA's second-largest corporate program, though it apparently only gets about half the funding of Fairview.