Wired News reports on another whistleblower:
AT&T provided National Security Agency eavesdroppers with full access to its customers’ phone calls, and shunted its customers’ internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center, according to a former AT&T worker cooperating in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit against the company.
Mark Klein, a retired AT&T communications technician, submitted an affidavit in support of the EFF’s lawsuit this week. That class action lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco last January, alleges that AT&T violated federal and state laws by surreptitiously allowing the government to monitor phone and internet communications of AT&T customers without warrants.
On Wednesday, the EFF asked the court to issue an injunction prohibiting AT&T from continuing the alleged wiretapping, and filed a number of documents under seal, including three AT&T documents that purportedly explain how the wiretapping system works.
Read the whole thing. It explains how the NSA showed uo at Klein’s office, how they built a special room, how they split off the datastream, and how they hooked it into a data mining computer. As Klein says:
“Despite what we are hearing, and considering the public track record of this administration, I simply do not believe their claims that the NSA’s spying program is really limited to foreign communications or is otherwise consistent with the NSA’s charter or with FISA,” Klein’s wrote. “And unlike the controversy over targeted wiretaps of individuals’ phone calls, this potential spying appears to be applied wholesale to all sorts of internet communications of countless citizens.”
Let’s hope Feingold is ready to go on the floor of the Senate again and question these practices. The evidence is becoming overwhelming that our communications are not secure and that there is no judicial oversight for the spying BushCo. is engaged in.
Not a surprise, really. Just further confirmation of the insane days we are living through.
Boo, I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy and MLK assassinations, the race riots and Watergate. But nothing comes close compared to right now.
Because we always knew that ultimately sane people were leading us back then, even if some of them like Nixon were crooks.
We don’t have that comfort these days. Madmen have taken over our government.
one thing to have a corrupt executive branch, but we have Congress that has totally failed us.
Right after recess watch them rush to pass legislation to make all these illegal acts legal.
What we need to be doing now is to concentrate on November elections, become active, grab a pitch fork -help muck out the barn on Capitol Hill.
And the sane ones remaining lack the balls to stand up to them.
I feel like I’m in a time warp. When the kids started wearing bell-bottom pants again, I laughed…I had a nice pair of big bells when I was that age. LOL.
Now, 30 yrs later, we again have a lieing president, fighting a war based on lies, and spying on anyone who protests or disagrees with him. Nixon said he was a war-time president, and he needs to spy on us to keep us safe from the bad guys. I seem to recall that tricky dick was a fine Christian man, fighting on the side of god.
SIGH…will we ever learn?
To me, this is the real cause for alarm in the article:
They may not even have to indulge in any actual eavesdropping for this to be effective.Just the idea someone may be listening in is enough.
So lets see. the hotties are: ATT gave the piece of shit in the white house everything they asked for. The Senate couldn’t get their shit together cause the goppers would have screwed with the bill and we would have been screwed once again. Libby claims that the vp told him that the chimp ok’ed the name droppings and info. 81 dead in the non- civil war plagued Iraq.
NOW- if there is anyone out there thats till thins that that piece of garbage in the wh and his cronies shouldn’t be removed as quickly as is possible– well, I suggest that all of you stand up tall, bend over, put you heads up to your ass and then Kiss your you know whats goodbye! NOW folks, not tomorrow, not next week not next month but NOW!
A MUST- New Yorker Cy Hersh article. Then you all tell me if “NOW” isn’t the operative word.
A few weeks ago, when the phrase “data mining” came up in some reports I read about the NSA spying program and these illegal “wiretaps”, it seemed logical to infer that this is the direction we were headed. Data mining didn’t seem an appropriate tool to use in connection with wiretapping of individual phone lines, but would be very appropriate for use with data gathered from telephone and internet hubs.
“Total information awareness” never went away, it just went into the back room.
One hopes that as more people step forward, as more sunlight is shed on these activities, it will push the public further out of their collective slumber and let them realize the brink to which our country has been brought.