The Intercept this week offers up a fairly amazing report offering more hard details on how AT&T routinely helps the NSA and other intelligence organizations spy on Americans. The report, which piggybacks on revelations made by AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, notes how AT&T uses eight "wiretap rooms" (including the San Francisco one identified by Klein and the one location at AT&T's secretive building in Manhattan) to routinely pass data to the NSA.
The Intercept's report notes that these facilities operate inside of AT&T network offices in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC.
The report notes that by monitoring the "peering circuits" at these eight sites, the NSA can collect "not only AT&T’s data, they get all the data that’s interchanged between AT&T’s network and other companies," Klein, a 22 year former employee at AT&T, tells the outlet. This provides great efficiency for spying, Klein notes, "because the peering links, by the nature of the connections, are liable to carry everybody’s traffic at one point or another during the day, or the week, or the year."
AT&T's relationship with the NSA has long proven controversial. When the depth of the surveillance relationship was first revealed and it was shown that AT&T routinely helped the government tap dance around wiretap and privacy laws, AT&T simply lobbied to successfully have those laws changed, providing companies like AT&T and Verizon retroactive immunity for any crimes under the banner of national security.
While the NSA has numerous telecom industry spying partners including Verizon, the report notes that this program, launched in in 1985 under the project name FAIRVIEW, exclusively involves AT&T. Snowden documents and other whistleblower accounts reveal that this original program has since been widely expanded under the banner of other, deeper surveillance efforts.
One was code-named SAGUARO. Under SAGUARO, AT&T was "aggressively involved" in helping the NSA access data collected from "peering circuits" at the eight sites, as well as sorting the information based on intelligence value. From there, an operation named PINECONE was implemented to collect, sort and store those troves of intercepted data:
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NSA diagrams reveal that after it collects data from AT&T’s “access links” and “peering partners,” it is sent to a “centralized processing facility” code-named PINECONE, located somewhere in New Jersey. Inside the PINECONE facility, there is a secure space in which there is both NSA-controlled and AT&T-controlled equipment. Internet traffic passes through an AT&T “distribution box” to two NSA systems. From there, the data is then transferred about 200 miles southwest to its final destination: NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland.At the Maryland compound, the communications collected from AT&T’s networks are integrated into powerful systems called MAINWAY and MARINA, which the NSA uses to analyze metadata -- such as the “to” and “from” parts of emails, and the times and dates they were sent. The communications obtained from AT&T are also made accessible through a tool named XKEYSCORE, which NSA employees use to search through the full contents of emails, instant messenger chats, web-browsing histories, webcam photos, information about downloads from online services, and Skype sessions.
And while intelligence gathering and network monitoring are routine, the report goes to great lengths to highlight how AT&T and NSA have both routinely tap danced over, under, and around surveillance, privacy and wiretap laws for the better part of the last generation, free from pesky things like transparency or, often, anything even vaguely resembling adult supervision.