AT&T Played Key Role In NSA Spying

The article cites documents provided by whistleblower and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

While its known that American telecommunications companies worked closely with the NSA, the documents show that the government’s relationship with AT&T has been considered unique and productive, according to the newspaper.

Documents made available by Snowden reveal that AT&T received payments from the NSA in exchange for the company placing surveillance equipment at 17 different internet hubs across the Untied States, according to a story yesterday by The Verge. While one NSA document called AT&T ” highly collaborative”, another praised the carrier’s ” extreme willingness to help”.

US telecom giant AT&T helped the country’s National Security Agency (NSA) spy on vast internet traffic, a media report has said.

The Times and ProPublica report that Fairview and other code-named corporate entities were run out of the agency’s Special Source Operations division.

The N.S.A.’s top-secret budget in 2013 for the AT&T partnership was more than twice that of the next-largest such program, according to the documents.

The documents detailing this intensive cooperation were released by NSA leaker Edward Snowden and reviewed by NYT as well as ProPublica, a New York-based, privately-funded journalism venture. Read the full New York Times report here. AT&T surveillance assistance, via the Fairview program, dates back prior to the 9/11 attacks and the enactment of USA Patriot Act spying provisions, all the way to the mid-1980s after the company emerged as a long-distance powerhouse in the wake of the breakup of the Bell System.

The company also gave access to foreign-to-foreign internet traffic, which was especially valuable to NSA.

President Barack Obama signed a bill earlier this year reforming the way the NSA collects electronic communications. “For example, in a kidnapping situation we could provide help tracking down called numbers to assist law enforcement”, AT&T spokesman Brad Burns told Reuters by email.

“These documents not only further confirm our claims in Jewel, but convincingly demolish the government’s core response-that EFF cannot prove that AT&T’s facilities were used in the mass surveillance, ” said EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn.

“The documents showed that in September 2003 AT&T became the first partner to turn on a new collection capability which the NSA deemed a “‘live’ presence on the global net” and its engineers were the first to use new surveillance technologies the NSA had invented. Given that there are only three major telecommunications providers in the United States – AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon – it was not that hard to guess, of course.