Today AT&T announced that it has been named the Most Trusted in Privacy by the Ponemon Institute, an information security research company. While such an award is no doubt prestigious, it is laughably inappropriate for a company that sold its customers down the river when it gave the NSA unrestricted access to their calling records and Internet activities in compliance with the federal warrantless wiretapping program.
Referred to by the Bush administration as the “terrorist surveillance program,” the NSA was authorized by executive order to monitor the phone calls, emails, Internet activity, text messages and any other recordable form of communication involving anyone believed by the NSA to be outside the United States, even if one end of that communication is domestic.
This power could be executed without warrant, in contravention of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which stipulates that it is illegal to engage in electronic surveillance knowing that it is not authorized by statute. Further, the Wiretap Act piggybacks on FISA by prohibiting any person from illegally intercepting, disclosing, using or divulging phone calls or electronic communications.
Proponents have argued that very general language in the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF) passed by the senate in the days after 9/11 is statute enough to pass FISA’s requirements. Critics, meanwhile, have noted that by Ejusdem generis, a doctrine which says that ambiguous legal language must yield to specific provisions, the detailed language in FISA trumps the nebulous clauses of the AUMF, making the warrantless surveillance program altogether rather illegal. But I digress…
The exact scope of this program is not (and may never be) known, but it is a cold fact that the NSA was at one time or another provided total, unmonitored access (PDF) to all fiber optic communications between interconnect locations of America’s largest telecom companies. Harvested information is known to include email, phone conversations, browsing habits and activities on private corporate networks.
AT&T, for its part, is one of the most legendary accomplices in this disingenuous overture towards “national security.” According to a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2006, one of many egregious violations committed by the company included a database known as “Hawkeye,” which contained over 312TB of records detailing the parties and duration of every phone call made in the United States back to 2001.
The suit also alleges that a database known as “Aurora” was used to store network traffic data, including personally-identifying information, “acquired by firewalls, routers, honeypots and other devices on AT&T Corp.’s global IP (Internet Protocol) network.”
Finally, the suit notes that all of this information was overseen by a vast framework known as “Daytona,” which permitted AT&T to quickly and efficiently query this information to extract meaningful results.
Hawkeye, Aurora and Daytona were all accessible by the feds at one time or another, and AT&T was willingly complicit in the scheme, according to Mark Klein, a former AT&T employee turned whistle-blower.
In January 2003, Klein watched a new room being built adjacent to the room housing AT&T’s #4ESS switching equipment. Located at AT&T’s central office on Folsom Street in San Francisco, this equipment is responsible for routing long distance and international calls.
“I learned that the person whom the NSA interviewed for the secret job was the person working to install equipment in this room,” Klein wrote. “The regular technician work force was not allowed in the room.”
Klein’s job eventually included connecting Internet circuits to a splitting cabinet that connected to the secret room. In his time at that job, he also learned that similar secret rooms and cabinets were being installed in Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego.
“While doing my job, I learned that fiber optic cables from the secret room were tapping into the WorldNet (AT&T’s internet service) circuits by splitting off a portion of the light signal,” Klein wrote.
The split circuits included traffic from peering links connecting to other Internet backbone providers, meaning AT&T was diverting traffic routed into and out of its network from other domestic and international ISPs.
The secret room, Klein said in 2006, also included a Narus STA 6400, which is “known to be used particularly by government intelligence agencies because of its ability to sift through large amounts of data looking for preprogrammed targets.”
By 2008, AT&T’s marketing department was making light of the surveillance program with an ad campaign, which implied that people with nothing to hide have nothing to worry about. This obtuse false dilemma mentality plagues AT&T’s brass even today.
Working so closely with the NSA, however, AT&T’s advertorial hubris makes perfect sense. Just days after the campaign went live, the outgoing Bush administration tacitly acknowledged the illegalities of the warrantless wiretapping program by granting telecom firms immunity to indictment on counts of FISA violations with the FISA Amendment Act of 2008.
Never mind the fact that hundreds, if not thousands, of citizens were the victim of a vast and illegal electronic dragnet. AT&T and their best buddies in government have virtually assured that the American public will never know the extent of the gross privacy violations that were done upon them for the sophistic, paranoid cult of national security.
If, however, the Ponemon Institute’s award is for the superlative degrees in which AT&T has conspired to keep private the largest breach of privacy in American history, then allow me to give the first applause for an honor well deserved.
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