Leaked NSA documents show AT&T helped spy agency

Intelligence officials had initially said that the phone calls the NSA had collected were mostly from landline, not cellular, phone records, after Snowden first revealed the wiretapping program.

It installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its Internet hubs on American soil, far more than its competitor Verizon.

NSA documents, freshly disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden and obtained by the New York Times, detail the relationship between the two organizations in the decade leading up to 2013.

AT&T was the first corporation to support NSA’s aim to have “live”, real-time surveillance of the internet.

AT&T isn’t commenting on the news. The company also received $10 million from the NSA for its cooperation in the matter, reportedly double than the second largest provider surveillance agreement (thought to be Verizon) received.

The documents, according to the article, don’t actually name AT&T but use code names that the Times and Pro Publica concluded referred to the company.

The NSA says the activities helped foil several terrorist plots and were a key in keeping the country safe.

A spokesman for AT&T would not substantiate any of the Times’s speculation on the story, saying, “We do not voluntarily provide information to any investigating authorities other than if a person’s life is in danger and time is of the essence”.

Furthermore, said EFF executive director Cindy Cohn, the documents “convincingly demolish the government’s core response” to the Jewel lawsuit-that EFF cannot prove that AT&T’s facilities were used in the mass surveillance.

AT&T, however, has been especially helpful to the NSA, leaked documents show. A group of AT&T customers recently claimed that the NSA’s tapping of the Internet violated the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches.

Connections were made between AT&T and Fairview in the aftermath of Japan’s 2011 natural disaster.

Washington has since told the UN it would not collect data on its communications.

The New York Times has revealed in a recent report that the US National Security Agency (NSA) received valuable assistance for bigwig wireless carrier AT&T under the agency’s Fairview program for snooping on domestic Internet and telephone traffic.

NSA protocols call for agents to exercise maximum courtesy in their dealings with the corporations, on the grounds that US intelligence ties to the corporations constitute “a partnership, not a contractual relationship”.

AT&T’s provision of foreign-to-foreign traffic has been particularly important to the NSA because large amounts of the world’s Internet communications travel across U.S. cables.