« Monday Gumpagraph | Main | Today's Bush Joke »

May 22, 2006

AT&T Whistleblower: NSA Taps Internet Trunk Lines At Telecom Sites

Politics  Rights, Law

As I've been saying here for a while, the little that we've been told about NSA snooping on electronic communications inside the US is just the tip of a very large iceberg. It's axiomatic: what gets released publicly is always just a small glimpse of the whole ugly reality. We will likely never know the full extent of what they've been up to, but every new story enlarges the scope.

Now, from Wired, here's an affadavit by former AT&T technician Mark Klein, who says the NSA is tapped into the main trunk lines of the Internet, from where they can monitor literally everything that goes over the Net: email, IM, chat, web site usage, file uploads and downloads, you name it. Excerpt:

In 2003 AT&T built "secret rooms" hidden deep in the bowels of its central offices in various cities, housing computer gear for a government spy operation which taps into the company's popular WorldNet service and the entire internet. These installations enable the government to look at every individual message on the internet and analyze exactly what people are doing. Documents showing the hardware installation in San Francisco suggest that there are similar locations being installed in numerous other cities. [...]

The essential hardware elements of a TIA [Total Information Awareness]-type spy program are being surreptitiously slipped into "real world" telecommunications offices.

In San Francisco the "secret room" is Room 641A at 611 Folsom Street, the site of a large SBC phone building, three floors of which are occupied by AT&T. High-speed fiber-optic circuits come in on the 8th floor and run down to the 7th floor where they connect to routers for AT&T's WorldNet service, part of the latter's vital "Common Backbone." In order to snoop on these circuits, a special cabinet was installed and cabled to the "secret room" on the 6th floor to monitor the information going through the circuits. (The location code of the cabinet is 070177.04, which denotes the 7th floor, aisle 177 and bay 04.) The "secret room" itself is roughly 24-by-48 feet, containing perhaps a dozen cabinets including such equipment as Sun servers and two Juniper routers, plus an industrial-size air conditioner.

The normal work force of unionized technicians in the office are forbidden to enter the "secret room," which has a special combination lock on the main door. The telltale sign of an illicit government spy operation is the fact that only people with security clearance from the National Security Agency can enter this room. In practice this has meant that only one management-level technician works in there. Ironically, the one who set up the room was laid off in late 2003 in one of the company's endless "downsizings," but he was quickly replaced by another.

Plans for the "secret room" were fully drawn up by December 2002, curiously only four months after Darpa started awarding contracts for TIA. One 60-page document, identified as coming from "AT&T Labs Connectivity & Net Services" and authored by the labs' consultant Mathew F. Casamassima, is titled Study Group 3, LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco and dated 12/10/02. This document addresses the special problem of trying to spy on fiber-optic circuits. Unlike copper wire circuits which emit electromagnetic fields that can be tapped into without disturbing the circuits, fiber-optic circuits do not "leak" their light signals. In order to monitor such communications, one has to physically cut into the fiber somehow and divert a portion of the light signal to see the information.

This problem is solved with "splitters" which literally split off a percentage of the light signal so it can be examined. This is the purpose of the special cabinet referred to above: Circuits are connected into it, the light signal is split into two signals, one of which is diverted to the "secret room." The cabinet is totally unnecessary for the circuit to perform — in fact it introduces problems since the signal level is reduced by the splitter — its only purpose is to enable a third party to examine the data flowing between sender and recipient on the internet. [Emphasis added]

Wired has the full statement here (pdf). We don't have to just take Klein's word for it, he's got supporting technical documentation and wiring diagrams, all available via links in his affadavit.

On the one hand, it's not surprising. One always assumed they were listening in. But on the other hand, it's outrageous. Treasonous, in fact. They've crumpled the Constitution into a little ball and tossed it out the window. If laws don't apply to the government, all bets are off.

Posted by Jonathan at May 22, 2006 10:27 PM  

Comments

When I took some IT classes at a local community college in 2003-4, one of the instructors worked for AT&T. He described exactly such a secret room.

Posted by: at May 23, 2006 03:43 PM

These revelations are disturbing at the very least. Kudos to Wired.com and Mark Klein for sharing the info.

Posted by: shadowmancer at May 25, 2006 10:36 AM