AT&T could have helped NSA in its secret surveillance program

Some newly disclosed documents, dating from 2003 to 2013, cite that the telecom company, AT&T, has been helping the U.S. NSA to spy on the Internet traffic passing across the United States.

Such details from the decades-long partnership between the government and AT&T emerged from NSA documents provided by former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden, the Times reported in a story posted Saturday on its website. One document described it as “highly collaborative”, while another lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help”.

AT&T spokesman Brad Burns told VOA that the company does not “provide information to any investigating authorities without a court order or other mandatory process, other than if a person’s life is in danger and time is of the essence”.

The link to AT&T isn’t directly obvious from the documents themselves, because the documents rely on NSA’s codename for AT&T-Fairview. In communications between an American and a foreigner overseas, the NSA can target the foreigner without first obtaining a court order, while foreign-to-foreign communications are free for bulk collection by the agency. While Edward Snowden’s whistle-blowing in 2013 has made it more hard to determine the extent of the relationship between the telecommunications leader and the government agency today, the comprehensiveness of their partnership, previously unknown to the public, has certainly raised red flags everywhere.

AT&T’s “corporate relationship provide unique access to other unique accesses to other telecoms and I.S.P.s”. The division is responsible for more than 80 percent of the information the NSA collects, one document states. Despite the fact that AT&T has not been specifically named in the recently leaked NSA documents, the Times and a number of ex-intelligence officials have revealed that the code names used in the documents point to AT&T. Another program, called Stormbrew, included AT&T’s similar-sized competitor Verizon. AT&T has gone above and beyond in assisting and complying with the NSA being their “undercover” spy.

This appears to contradict statements by intelligence officials to reporters, following earlier revelations by Snowden, that for technical reasons it was mostly Americans’ landline phone records that were being collected.

However, AT&T is only one of many companies involved. It began in 1985, the year after antitrust regulators broke up the Massachusetts Bell telephone monopoly and its long-distance division became AT&T Communications.