AT&T Forwarding All Internet Traffic to NSA?

An anonymous reader writes "SpamDailyNews is reporting that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a brief that claims AT&T has been forwarding internet traffic directly into the hands of the NSA. The brief was filed under seal (a procedure that allows only the judge and the litigants to view the document) in order to give the court time to review the information. From the article: 'More than just threatening individuals' privacy, AT&T's apparent choice to give the government secret, direct access to millions of ordinary Americans' Internet communications is a threat to the Constitution itself. We are asking the Court to put a stop to it now.'"

Coincidence?

And you wonder why the feds have no problem with the AT&T monopoly getting back together? Can we file this under the "You-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-your" department?

Re:Coincidence?

Next time yell "Frist Post!" Damn noobs... gotta explain everything to them.

Re:Coincidence?

The funny thing is that this is exactly the first thing that came to my mind.

After reading your comment I think thought, "And perhaps this is why Net Neutrality will never happen."

Re:Coincidence?

That why I do, and encourage others to, donate to the EFF.

Re:Coincidence?

Is it still technically 'wiretapping' if there is no wire, ...?

Sure, just as what I'm doing now is "typing" although there's not a typewriter in the house.

It's still "wiretapping" when it's wireless, as this message will be when I hit the "Submit" button.

For that matter, that thingie is still a "button" although it's just made of pixels on the screen, and will cease to "exist" milliseconds after I "hit" it.

If we're not careful, this could lead to a deep discussion on the nature of reality. Or at least the nature of linguistic referents.

Here goes ...

Re:Coincidence?

AT&T is a company, it's not a government. They can do what they want with their customers data ...

Actually, they're more a shell corporation that exists partly so that this sort of logic can be used to exempt them from legal restrictions (such as the Bill of Rights) than would apply to a government agency. They have always been a government agency in all but the legal niceties.

Their basic business involves selling something that pretty much has to be done by a government agency. Otherwise, we'd have the scenario of hundreds or thousands of companies running wires down our streets. At any given time, half those wires would be down, the streets would be impassible by vehicles, and our kids and pets would be in danger of electrocution if they wandered outside. So the government outlaw such wiring, except to strictly regulated corporations.

(This isn't hypothetical. Here in Boston, we've had several large dogs electrocuted by contact with a manhole cover, and in New York, at least one human has died this way. The pseudo-private electric companies haven't been punished in any meaningful way for these deaths.)

The problem is that in the US and many other countries, there are legal restrictions on how a government agency can (mis)use this wiring. The Bill of Rights guarantees us freedom of speech, assembly, and so on. A government agency couldn't enforce a "no servers" rule, for instance; we'd just say "First Ammendment", and the courts would rule in our favor. A government agency couldn't legally restrict our use of the wires, just as they can't restrict our use of the roads, unless they could show that we're engaged in illegal activities. A government agency couldn't intercept and record our traffic without a court order.

But AT&T can legally do all these things, because legally they're "not government". They are created by the government, their monopoly is enforced by the government, and they are at the mercy of the government for their regulated profits. So they act like a government agency, but one without the need to abide by such silly restrictions as the Bill of Rights.

We're just seeing one of the more blatant violations of the Bill of Rights that this legal arrangement makes possible.

Stop repeating this...

The EFF does not have a "losing record." Please stop repeating this. That was what appeared to be a hoax posting in the Register for some reason picked up in slashdot. It was simply made up. The hoax cited some lost cases that were not EFF cases. The EFF has a record of many significant victories, check out the web site. Of course the EFF does not win all the time, if we did it would mean we were being far too cautious in chosing what to defend, but please stop repeating this "losing record" stuff.

Re:Stop repeating this...

Here's the (partial) list of EFF legal victories [eff.org] - over forty key cases, each against tough opponents. That's not including the work EFF does lobbying against bad laws, technical research on topics like cracking DES, analysing printer dots, and publicising issues like the broadcast flag and the dangers of DRM. To get an example of the breadth of that work, here's another short list [eff.org] of EFF's work last year. We chopped the list at 15 items because the list was compiled for our fifteenth anniversary.

Re:Coincidence?

One word: Encryption

Start using it, get everyone you know to use it. Encrypt everything.

Exactly. Those of us who are Internet old-timers have long understood that the online world is in fact totally open. There is no privacy online. Never has been, and never will be.

You should always assume that everything here is visible to everyone, and may be archived at lots of places you don't know about. The NSA's archives are just one of many places where our words and pictures are being enshrined for posterity. Consider, for example, that every email you've ever sent is potentially available to every prospective employer, and to all your relatives and friends.

There is nothing much any of us can do about this. If you don't like this, don't put things online. This includes email. As soon as it goes out of your machine, you have no way of knowing who has a copy.

Encryption is partly successful at fighting this. If you've used a good encryption scheme, reading your words will be very expensive for a bystander, so they won't do it without good reason. But with enough computing power, most encryption other than a truly random one-time pad can be broken. And computing power is getting cheaper, so with time, the cost of decrypting your stuff will drop. So it will mostly buy you time before your stuff can be read by everyone.

The real problem now is that, while everything on the Internet is potentially visible to those with political and economic power, the opposite isn't true. Imagine the effects if everything in every government and corporate office (and neighborhood bar ;-) were visible to the public.

OK; what would mostly happen is that in most cases the onlookers would fall asleep. But it's interesting to think of a world in which we could access all of our own governments' and employers' information. This could go a long way toward loosening their power over us.

There have been a few sci-fi novels written that deal with such a scenario. Anyone want to mention their favorite?

Re:Coincidence?

And you wonder why the feds have no problem with the AT&T monopoly getting back together?

The feds--and many economists--have no problem with AT&T essentially reassembling itself because competition exists today that did not exist in the past. Cable companies, wireless companies and straight VoIP providers can all provide telephone service in direct competition with typical land-line phone companies. The phone companies are also competing with those companies on THEIR domains (for example, video over Internet lines--the reason they're interested in laying fiber all of the sudden).

These new forms of competition are also, undoubtedly, why you are hearing phone companies beginning to make a stink about charging people to carry traffic over their pipes.

Laying fiber?

The phone companies are also competing with those companies on THEIR domains (for example, video over Internet lines--the reason they're interested in laying fiber all of the sudden).

New fiber?

AFAIK, the only fiber they're interested in laying is to span that last-mile to the home... something they swore up and down they were going to do ten years ago. And they got xx billions in tax breaks + fees for it.

There's plenty of unlit fiber lying around, just not in the last mile.

The "phone companies beginning to make a stink about charging people to carry traffic over their pipes" because they're looking at the next 10 years and thinking "Crap, the marketplace is getting saturated & prices are going to come down. How are we going to continue growing?"

Re:Coincidence?

Well, the government might have trouble beating Google in terms of brains by being a more attractive employer (although maybe not by much--there's plenty of brainpower to go around and even if Google hires as many people as it wants to from the very top of the talent spectrum, the NSA will still be able to attract plenty of really smart people), but I don't think they're worried about computing power. The NSA was for a long time by far the world's biggest purchaser of supercomputers, and probably still is.

If Google can index the entire web with spiders that have to actually go out and find the data they're indexing, I think it's fairly likely the NSA can process information that's fed directly to them by internet providers.

Re:Coincidence?

One of my lecturers once said that the NSA measures (measured?) computing power not in terms of speed or memory size but 'in square miles'.

Probably a joke but he definitely got me thinking about the scale that they were on :)

Echelon anyone?

Echelon is NOT a fairy tale.

The NSA has more computing power and human analyst brainpower than is probably believable.

Back in the days when I did NeXT machines and software development, I heard that the NSA bought 400 NeXT cubes. The joke was "of course they did...saves them a ton of money on black paint!"

I later heard that the NSA liked the fact that the magnesium case was a pretty effective RF shield.

And then I got to see a NeXT app, Zilla, that let you build an early parallel processing system. Now, 400 Motorola 68040 CPUs isn't a Cray, but it's close. NeXT used 50 cubes to crunch on Fermat's Theorem and got throughout similar to a Cray YMP48 (this was 1990-91, so I may be fuzzy on this, but that's what I think I heard)

So, if the NSA was dorking with massively parallel systems 15-20 years ago, where are they today?

Personally, I think they have the data acquisition capability...with or without AT&T, the processing power, and plenty of human talent to build the data sieves to extract something useful.

Wait a minute...there's a knock at my door................

Re:The fall of small r Repubs & rise of survei

We ought to remember that President Washington also warned of the dangers of standing armies:

While, then, every part of our country thus feels an immediate and particular interest in union, all the parts combined cannot fail to find in the united mass of means and efforts greater strength, greater resource, proportionably greater security from external danger, a less frequent interruption of their peace by foreign nations; and, what is of inestimable value, they must derive from union an exemption from those broils and wars between themselves, which so frequently afflict neighboring countries not tied together by the same governments, which their own rival ships alone would be sufficient to produce, but which opposite foreign alliances, attachments, and intrigues would stimulate and embitter. Hence, likewise, they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty. In this sense it is that your union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of the other.

And from Eisenhower:

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Very precient, both of them.

Re:Hmm

What? You're glad that you aren't helping the Fight Against the Islamic Terrorists?

You must be one of them!

Will they open documents?

I am so glad I use verizon as my ISP.

As TFA says:

The internal AT&T documents and portions of the supporting declarations have been submitted to the Court under a tentative seal, a procedure that allows AT&T five court days to explain to the Court why the information should be kept from the public.

I can't think of any possible justification for the documents to be kept sealed, but I wouldn't be suprised if the government wades in complaining that these document are directly related to National Security, and, should therefore be kept sealed, or claim that it would endanger their own investigations [washingtonpost.com].

You think Verizon is different?

Remember Carnivore [wikipedia.org]? The US intelligence agencies have had for years the capability to analyze some of the Internet traffic going through the US. To do so they must have some direct connection to the backbone. Apparently AT&T has been providing some of the connection by I doubt that they are the only ones. Given that they were able to intercept communications in foreign countries I would surely expect them to be able to access the backbone even if no local company co-operated and hence I assume that anything I transmit unencrypted is accessible to US intelligence. So far this hasn't led me to encrypt any non-commercial communications.

On the policy side, this is an issue of trust and secrecy. This kind of intelligence operation is something you want to be available due to its good uses (and don't want to know about it), but you are afraid of because of the way the government can abuse it. The current administration has greatly reduced my trust in the professionalism of the US intelligence agencies to the point where I'm willing to support this kind of lawsuit.

Re:You think Verizon is different?

Apparently AT&T has been providing some of the connection by I doubt that they are the only ones.

It has been intimated in the press that George W. Bush's illegal wire tapping went much deeper than has been admitted to. This is it. All Internet and Voice communications in the United States of America is now or was at some point being recorded by the NSA. It makes sense and it was certainly not just AT&T. Sure you can write that it was only a selected few messages or phone conversations that actually were brought to the attention of real people at NSA, probably measured in the tens of thousands out of many millions of people. But the computers, which were programmed by people, went through every message of every conversation. It is the only way to wiretap the internet in a centralized way without actually physically tapping wires.

When George Walker Bush says they only intercepted messages of terrorists and terrorist associates, it is a lie. They intercept everything and sorted it out later. What he is trying to assure you of is that they don't really care about what you had to say unless you are plotting terrorism, which is probably largely true. But how long until such a powerful tool is directed towards lesser threats? We already know that during the 90's NSA intercepted foreign communications regarding a civilian airbus deal were used by US government to help Boeing win European civilian contracts. How was that for a national security purpose? I am sure they went through mental hoops to think what they were doing was right. And before the mid 1970's the FBI used domestic terrorism as an excuse to wiretap political civil rights and anti war activists when there was no reasonable expectation that these groups or individuals would resort to violence in support of their causes.

A free society must choose to be free.

It is indeed scary

But for different reasons than you say.

I seriously doubt that the vast majority of internet traffic and/or telephone traffic could be stored for later easy access (or at least access at a much later time). You have problems of information overload and quite frankly data storage as well.

The problem is not in the idea that the calls are probably being stored, but that every call is being passively monitored (and temporarily recorded). In essence, everyone must operate under the assumption that every telephone call, every email, and every post to Slashdot is at least passively being passively watched by Big Brother. The potential for chilling effects in areas such as discussing whether the Hamas victory in the PA elections is a good thing is pretty high, what the real meaning of "Jihad" is, etc.

In essence, this creates a widespread, if passive, surveillance structure which creates a chilling effect on legitimate political discussions. If you think it only effects terrorists, you are incredibly mistaken. It effects anyone who takes an interest in Middle-Eastern politics, anyone who wants to have religious discussions online with Muslims, and anyone who is afraid he/she might have had a runin with people who might be watched by even rogue members of the NSA.

This is exactly the danger that the 1st and 4th ammendments were designed to prevent.

Re:Will they open documents?

Using Verizon as your ISP is no defense: if your traffic passes over AT&T owned wire, to or from your destination, you are vulnerable to this kind of snooping. This is particularly true for international traffic, much of which is over fiber-optic cable owned by AT&T. The routers connecting to those cables are one of the best possible places for network monitoring, and you'd better believe that the NSA is happy to install it there, with AT&T cooperation.

There are certainly tools that can track and record every byte sent on every port on a saturated 100 MHz link, and write it to local disk. Given that the trans-atlantic links are rarely GigE capable, a rack of such devices should easily monitor and re-assemble all the traffic desired. www.sandstorm.com, for example, sells exactly that sort of monitoring tool called "Netintercept", commercially. There's no reason to think the NSA doesn't use them or hasn't reverse engineered them.

Wrong

TAT 14, the latest transatlantic cable (circa 2001) has four fiber pairs. Each uses 16 wavelengths of STM-64 (10 Gbps). That is 640 Gbps total. ATT is part owner.

TATs are *more* than Gigabit capable

What are you on?

TAT-14 [wikipedia.org], the newest iteration of US-to-UK transatlantic communication cable, consists of 32 STM-64 circuits. Each STM-64 is capable of nearly 10 Gbps...

i use comcast, try this-nimrod

C:\>tracert slashdot.org

Tracing route to slashdot.org [66.35.250.150]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
**CUT SOME**

    5 56 ms 52 ms 62 ms te-2-1-ar01.absecon.nj.panjde.comcast.net [68.86 .210.126]
    6 59 ms 69 ms 64 ms po10-ar01.audubon.nj.panjde.comcast.net [68.86.2
08.22]
    7 58 ms 55 ms 52 ms 68.86.211.10
    8 56 ms 69 ms 58 ms 12.118.114.17
    9 62 ms 57 ms 60 ms tbr1-p012301.phlpa.ip.att.net [12.123.137.62]
  10 68 ms 59 ms 59 ms tbr1-cl8.n54ny.ip.att.net [12.122.2.17]
  11 65 ms 57 ms 62 ms ar5-a300s5.n54ny.ip.att.net [12.123.0.89]

See lines 9, 10, 11? see the part at the end? att.net? guess what that means?

try a tracert yourself.

Never thought I'd see the day...

...but here we are. Big Brother REALLY IS watching...

One big question

How do they know it?

Re:One big question

Presumeably, one employee at AT&T had a shred of human decency and decided to leak this information.

Don't worry. He'll be hunted down.

I would love to cancel my AT&T / SBC services

I would love to cancel my AT&T / SBC services but... my rental agreement requires that I have a phone line for my security system. What can I do? If I complain to AT&T no one will care.

Re:I would love to cancel my AT&T / SBC servic

Get an analog cell phone. Get a data adaptor for it. (it's just an RJ-11 jack that plugs into the cell, and makes it act like a landline)

Yes, the cell phone has to be analog. Digital phones don't give you this option, due to the lossy compression.

Alternately, get a VOIP service that works with fax systems (important - takes more bandwidth, costs more money, but has not as lossy compression as cheap VOIP), and a good UPS.

Easy

AT&T has been forwarding internet traffic directly into the hands of the NSA

Well this should be easy enough to check for, just use traceroute, right?

Re:Easy

AT&T has been forwarding internet traffic directly into the hands of the NSA

Well this should be easy enough to check for, just use traceroute, right?

It is just a matter of duplicating all the packets that traverses a router. Properly done you will not notice this.

Out of control ?

at what point do you realise that the current administration is out of control , perhaps when soldiers are knocking on your door ?

seems like the enemy is very much within, isn't democracy wonderful

Re:Out of control ?

seems like the enemy is very much within

Which is exactly why we need a state crackdown, and to spy on our own civilians! Who knows what the Enemy Within might be plotting? It would be disastrous if one of these people, with no respect for the rights and traditions of Western civilisation, were to infiltrate the corridors of power - imagine the damage that could be done!

Re:Out of control ?

"at what point do you realise that the current administration is out of control , perhaps when soldiers are knocking on your door ?"

I think a lot of us have realized it was out of control for quite some time. However aside from voting and writing our congress critters and protesting and trying to stir things up in the media, we are left with few to zero direct options for fixing the situation.

In the old days if you didn't like your government, you would take up arms and overthrow them or have them arrested. These days the government is above the law, and if you were to take up arms against them you would either be killed or considered a terrorist and secretly shipped away to some torture camp.

Honestly, what other options do we have? As much as I love fighting the good f