****UPDATE****


Taken from Forbes.com:


New York -

A federal judge dealt a blow to AT&T Wednesday, ruling that secret documents supposedly linking the telecom giant with a U.S. government domestic spying program can be used in a lawsuit.

The suit, filed in January by the privacy watchdog group Electronic Frontier Foundation, accuses AT&T (nyse: T - news - people ) of handing over customer data to the National Security Agency even though the federal agency did not provide a court order. Last week, USA Today published a widely discussed story that said AT&T, Verizon (nyse: VZ - news - people ) and Bell South (nyse: BLS - news - people ) had offered up millions of customer records to the NSA. The lawsuit, which says AT&T has been handing over call records from as early as 2001, makes broader claims, arguing that the company has provided the NSA with the content of many calls.

The documents in the AT&T case, which were given to the EFF by a former phone company employee, are sealed and will remain so for the immediate future. U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker told AT&T lawyers, who had argued that the documents contain trade secrets, to work with the EFF to pare down sensitive information so the files could be viewed in open court.

AT&T said it supported Walker's decision to keep the documents sealed; the company didn't address the EFF allegations directly but said AT&T had acted legally. "There has been a lot of speculation on this issue, but the fact is, AT&T does not provide customer information to law enforcement authorities or government agencies without legal authorization," said AT&T spokesman Marc Bien in a written statement. "We have an obligation to assist law enforcement and other government agencies responsible for protecting the public welfare, whether it be [the welfare of] an individual or the security interests of the entire nation."

Both Verizon and BellSouth issued statements this week denying the accusations. "Verizon cannot and will not comment on the [alleged NSA surveillance] program," the company said in a written statement Tuesday. "Verizon cannot and will not confirm or deny whether it has any relationship to it. That said, media reports made claims about Verizon that are simply false."

BellSouth said it had addressed the newspaper's claims with an internal fact-finding review: "Based on our review to date, we have confirmed no such contract exists, and we have not provided bulk customer calling records to the NSA."

But the telephone companies' denials give them plenty of wiggle room. "I think they're very wisely being cautious about what they say and preserving their options," says Rosalind Allen, a Washington, D.C., telecom attorney with Holland & Knight. "In fact, we don't know what really happened. We're not sure still what kind of interaction they did have with the NSA. Just because they say, 'We didn't disclose all customer records' ... Did you disclose some records?"

The phone companies now have multiple legal battles to contend with. On Wednesday, attorneys added AT&T and BellSouth to a class action filed last week against Verizon, accusing the company of violating customers' rights.

And the Electronic Privacy Information Center also filed a complaint Wednesday with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin, asking the agency to investigate whether the telcos shared private information with the NSA, a potential violation of the Communications Act.

The next hearing in the EFF-AT&T case is set for June 23 at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, when Judge Walker will hear dismissal motions from both AT&T and the U.S. Department of Justice.

Taken from Wired News' story on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's class action lawsuit against AT&T: Testimony of ex-AT&T technician


AT&T's Implementation of NSA Spying on American Citizens

31 December 2005

I wrote the following document in 2004 when it became clear to me that AT&T, at the behest of the National Security Agency, had illegally installed secret computer gear designed to spy on internet traffic. At the time I thought this was an outgrowth of the notorious Total Information Awareness program which was attacked by defenders of civil liberties. But now it's been revealed by The New York Times that the spying program is vastly bigger and was directly authorized by President Bush, as he himself has now admitted, in flagrant violation of specific statutes and constitutional protections for civil liberties. I am presenting this information to facilitate the dismantling of this dangerous Orwellian project.
AT&T Deploys Government Spy Gear on WorldNet Network

-- 16 January, 2004

In 2003 AT&T built "secret rooms" hidden deep in the bowels of its central offices in various cities, housing computer gear for a government spy operation which taps into the company's popular WorldNet service and the entire internet. These installations enable the government to look at every individual message on the internet and analyze exactly what people are doing. Documents showing the hardwire installation in San Francisco suggest that there are similar locations being installed in numerous other cities.

The physical arrangement, the timing of its construction, the government-imposed secrecy surrounding it, and other factors all strongly suggest that its origins are rooted in the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness (TIA) program which brought forth vigorous protests from defenders of constitutionally protected civil liberties last year:
"As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant." The New York Times, 9 November 2002

To mollify critics, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) spokesmen have repeatedly asserted that they are only conducting "research" using "artificial synthetic data" or information from "normal DOD intelligence channels" and hence there are "no U.S. citizen privacy implications" (Department of Defense, Office of the Inspector General report on TIA, December 12, 2003). They also changed the name of the program to "Terrorism Information Awareness" to make it more politically palatable. But feeling the heat, Congress made a big show of allegedly cutting off funding for TIA in late 2003, and the political fallout resulted in Adm. Poindexter's abrupt resignation last August. However, the fine print reveals that Congress eliminated funding only for "the majority of the TIA components," allowing several "components" to continue (DOD, ibid). The essential hardware elements of a TIA-type spy program are being surreptitiously slipped into "real world" telecommunications offices.

In San Francisco the "secret room" is Room 641A at 611 Folsom Street, the site of a large SBC phone building, three floors of which are occupied by AT&T. High-speed fiber-optic circuits come in on the 8th floor and run down to the 7th floor where they connect to routers for AT&T's WorldNet service, part of the latter's vital "Common Backbone." In order to snoop on these circuits, a special cabinet was installed and cabled to the "secret room" on the 6th floor to monitor the information going through the circuits. (The location code of the cabinet is 070177.04, which denotes the 7th floor, aisle 177 and bay 04.) The "secret room" itself is roughly 24-by-48 feet, containing perhaps a dozen cabinets including such equipment as Sun servers and two Juniper routers, plus an industrial-size air conditioner.

The normal work force of unionized technicians in the office are forbidden to enter the "secret room," which has a special combination lock on the main door. The telltale sign of an illicit government spy operation is the fact that only people with security clearance from the National Security Agency can enter this room. In practice this has meant that only one management-level technician works in there. Ironically, the one who set up the room was laid off in late 2003 in one of the company's endless "downsizings," but he was quickly replaced by another.

Plans for the "secret room" were fully drawn up by December 2002, curiously only four months after Darpa started awarding contracts for TIA. One 60-page document, identified as coming from "AT&T Labs Connectivity & Net Services" and authored by the labs' consultant Mathew F. Casamassima, is titled Study Group 3, LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco and dated 12/10/02. (See sample PDF 1-4.) This document addresses the special problem of trying to spy on fiber-optic circuits. Unlike copper wire circuits which emit electromagnetic fields that can be tapped into without disturbing the circuits, fiber-optic circuits do not "leak" their light signals. In order to monitor such communications, one has to physically cut into the fiber somehow and divert a portion of the light signal to see the information.

This problem is solved with "splitters" which literally split off a percentage of the light signal so it can be examined. This is the purpose of the special cabinet referred to above: Circuits are connected into it, the light signal is split into two signals, one of which is diverted to the "secret room." The cabinet is totally unnecessary for the circuit to perform -- in fact it introduces problems since the signal level is reduced by the splitter -- its only purpose is to enable a third party to examine the data flowing between sender and recipient on the internet.

The above-referenced document includes a diagram (PDF 3) showing the splitting of the light signal, a portion of which is diverted to "SG3 Secure Room," i.e., the so-called "Study Group" spy room. Another page headlined "Cabinet Naming" (PDF 2) lists not only the "splitter" cabinet but also the equipment installed in the "SG3" room, including various Sun devices, and Juniper M40e and M160 "backbone" routers. PDF file 4 shows one of many tables detailing the connections between the "splitter" cabinet on the 7th floor (location 070177.04) and a cabinet in the "secret room" on the 6th floor (location 060903.01). Since the San Francisco "secret room" is numbered 3, the implication is that there are at least several more in other cities (Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego are some of the rumored locations), which likely are spread across the United States.

One of the devices in the "Cabinet Naming" list is particularly revealing as to the purpose of the "secret room": a Narus STA 6400. Narus is a 7-year-old company which, because of its particular niche, appeals not only to businessmen (it is backed by AT&T, JP Morgan and Intel, among others) but also to police, military and intelligence officials. Last November 13-14, for instance, Narus was the "Lead Sponsor" for a technical conference held in McLean, Virginia, titled "Intelligence Support Systems for Lawful Interception and Internet Surveillance." Police officials, FBI and DEA agents, and major telecommunications companies eager to cash in on the "war on terror" had gathered in the hometown of the CIA to discuss their special problems. Among the attendees were AT&T, BellSouth, MCI, Sprint and Verizon. Narus founder, Dr. Ori Cohen, gave a keynote speech. So what does the Narus STA 6400 do?

"The (Narus) STA Platform consists of stand-alone traffic analyzers that collect network and customer usage information in real time directly from the message.... These analyzers sit on the message pipe into the ISP (internet service provider) cloud rather than tap into each router or ISP device" (Telecommunications magazine, April 2000). A Narus press release (1 Dec., 1999) also boasts that its Semantic Traffic Analysis (STA) technology "captures comprehensive customer usage data ... and transforms it into actionable information.... (It) is the only technology that provides complete visibility for all internet applications."

To implement this scheme, WorldNet's high-speed data circuits already in service had to be rerouted to go through the special "splitter" cabinet. This was addressed in another document of 44 pages from AT&T Labs, titled "SIMS, Splitter Cut-In and Test Procedure," dated 01/13/03 (PDF 5-6). "SIMS" is an unexplained reference to the secret room. Part of this reads as follows:
"A WMS (work) Ticket will be issued by the AT&T Bridgeton Network Operation Center (NOC) to charge time for performing the work described in this procedure document....
"This procedure covers the steps required to insert optical splitters into select live Common Backbone (CBB) OC3, OC12 and OC48 optical circuits."

The NOC referred to is in Bridgeton, Missouri, and controls WorldNet operations. (As a sign that government spying goes hand-in-hand with union-busting, the entire (Communication Workers of America) Local 6377 which had jurisdiction over the Bridgeton NOC was wiped out in early 2002 when AT&T fired the union work force and later rehired them as nonunion "management" employees.) The cut-in work was performed in 2003, and since then new circuits are connected through the "splitter" cabinet.

Another "Cut-In and Test Procedure" document dated January 24, 2003, provides diagrams of how AT&T Core Network circuits were to be run through the "splitter" cabinet (PDF 7). One page lists the circuit IDs of key Peering Links which were "cut-in" in February 2003 (PDF 8), including ConXion, Verio, XO, Genuity, Qwest, PAIX, Allegiance, AboveNet, Global Crossing, C&W, UUNET, Level 3, Sprint, Telia, PSINet and Mae West. By the way, Mae West is one of two key internet nodal points in the United States (the other, Mae East, is in Vienna, Virginia). It's not just WorldNet customers who are being spied on -- it's the entire internet.

The next logical question is, what central command is collecting the data sent by the various "secret rooms"? One can only make educated guesses, but perhaps the answer was inadvertently given in the DOD Inspector General's report (cited above):

"For testing TIA capabilities, Darpa and the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) created an operational research and development environment that uses real-time feedback. The main node of TIA is located at INSCOM (in Fort Belvoir, Virginia)…."

Among the agencies participating or planning to participate in the INSCOM "testing" are the "National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the DOD Counterintelligence Field Activity, the U.S. Strategic Command, the Special Operations Command, the Joint Forces Command and the Joint Warfare Analysis Center." There are also "discussions" going on to bring in "non-DOD federal agencies" such as the FBI.

This is the infrastructure for an Orwellian police state. It must be shut down!

For those of you who have ignored my profile and/or away messages for the past week, there has been an ongoing congressional debate in the House over Network Neutrality. This issue is being pressed by telco lobbyists seeking legislation that would allow companies like Verizon and AT&T to give higher priority to sites that are willing to pay high fees in exchange for better service. In effect, this would create a two-tiered internet where those who cash out to the telcos would be put on a pedestal and granted immediate priority, whereas those with principles against extortion would be left in the dust with poor connection quality as the bandwidth is secured specifically for those who pay up.
As the internet stands currently, it is democratic in architecture. Every site on it is treated equally and given equal bandwidth so that everytime u go to google or your friends myspace even, your experience is roughly the same depending on the numbers of people hitting the site. Under a two tiered internet your experience will change dramatically from site to site, lets say you visit Google who has the money to pay for the best treatment, youll get the same experience you do now with pretty damn fast search results, however you stop by your myspace for a quick second and that quick second suddenly becomes five minutes waiting for the damn page to show up. Yikes. But the major concern of granting the telcos this kind of power would be their ability to control web content on the internet. Lets say your working for an advocate group such as the ACLU, perhaps Verizon has recently been drawn to court over silencing its employees who speak out about the allegations that it has been discriminant in its hiring practices(hypothetically). Now you and your colleagues in the ACLU are emailing each other, discussing your plans on filing a suit against Verizon on behalf of those employees discriminated against by the company. But wait, whats this? your service has suddenly dropped? I wonder why your ISP (Verizon) has suddenly dropped its services to you, you who pays $60 a month for premium service. This is censorship.

Today however Massachusetts congressman Ed Markey introduced onto the House floor a bill that would protect Network Neutrality and punish those who would thwart it. The Network Neutrality Act of 2006, sounds sexy. Here is the transcript of Markey's introduction of the bill:




"Mr. Speaker, I rise today to introduce the “Network Neutrality Act of 2006.” Joining me today as original cosponsors of this important legislation are Rep. Rick Boucher, Rep. Anna Eshoo and Rep. Jay Inslee.

Broadband networks, Mr. Speaker, are the lifeblood of our emerging digital economy. These broadband networks also hold the promise of promoting innovation in various markets and technologies, creating jobs, and furthering education. The world-wide leadership that the U.S. provides in high technology is directly related to the government-driven policies over decades which have ensured that telecommunications networks are open to all lawful uses and all users. The Internet, which is accessible to more and more Americans with every day that goes by on such broadband networks, was also founded upon an open architecture protocol and as a result it has provided low barriers to entry for web-based content, applications, and services.


Recent decisions by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and court interpretations, however, put these aspects of broadband networks and the Internet in jeopardy. The corrosion of historic policies of nondiscrimination by the imposition of bottlenecks by broadband network owners endanger economic growth, innovation, job creation, and First Amendment freedom of expression on such networks. Broadband network owners should not be able to determine who can and who cannot offer services over broadband networks or over the Internet. The detrimental effect to the digital economy would be quite severe if such conduct were permitted and became widespread.

This network neutrality bill has essentially three parts. The first part articulates overall broadband and network neutrality goals for the country, and spells out exactly what network neutrality means and puts it into the statute so that it will possess the force of law. The second part embodies reasonable exceptions to the general rules, such as to route emergency communications or offer consumer protection features, such as spam blocking technology. And the final part of the bill features an expedited complaint process to deal with grievances and violations within thirty days.

The legislation states that a broadband network provider may not block, impair, degrade or discriminate against the ability of any person to use a broadband connection to access the content, applications, and services available on broadband networks, including the Internet. It ensures that broadband network providers operate their networks in a non-discriminatory manner. The bill also ensures that consumers can attach any device to the broadband operator’s network, such as an Internet phone, or wi-fi router, or settop box, or any other innovative gadget invented in the coming years. Moreover, in order to prevent the warping of the World Wide Web into a system of “tiered service,” the legislation will prevent broadband providers from charging new bottleneck fees for enhanced quality of service or the prioritization of bits.

Finally, if a broadband provider chooses to prioritize data of any type, it requires that it do so for all data of that type and not charge a fee for such prioritization. For instance, if a broadband provider wants to prioritize the transmission of bits representing a VOIP phone call for its own VOIP service, it must do so for all VOIP services so as not to put its competitors at an arbitrary disadvantage.

Mr. Speaker, from the beginning of Internet time until August of 2005, the Internet’s nondiscriminatory nature was safeguarded from being compromised by Federal Communications Commission rules that required nondiscriminatory treatment by telecommunications carriers. In other words, no commercial telecommunications carrier could engage in discriminatory conduct regarding Internet traffic and Internet access because it was prohibited by law.

In August of 2005, however, the Federal Communications Commission re-classified broadband access to the Internet in a way which removed such legal protections. And how did the industry respond to this change? Just a few weeks after the FCC removed the Internet’s protections, the Chairman of then-SBC Communications made the following statement in a November 7th Business Week interview: "Now what they [Google, Yahoo, MSN] would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. . . .”

In a December 1, 2005 Washington Post article, a BellSouth executive indicated that his company wanted to strike deals to give certain Web sites priority treatment in reaching computer users. The article noted this would “significantly change how the Internet operates” and that the BellSouth executive said “his company should be allowed to charge a rival voice-over-Internet firm so that its service can operate with the same quality as BellSouth’s offering.” Meaning, that if the rival firm did not pay, or was not permitted to pay for competitive reasons, its service presumably would not “operate with the same quality” as BellSouth’s own product.

Finally, on January 6, 2006, the CEO of Verizon, in an address to the Consumer Electronics Show also indicated that Verizon would now be the corporate arbiter of how traffic would be treated when he said the following:” We have to make sure [content providers] don’t sit on our network and chew up our capacity.”

I think these statements should give pause to those who might argue that we shouldn’t do anything to enact strong network neutrality provisions because currently no harm is being done.

Do we really have to wait till these corporate giants divide and conquer the open architecture of the Internet to make that against the law? These telephone company executives are telling us that they intend to discriminate in the prioritization of bits and to discriminate in the offering of “quality of service” functions – for a new fee, a new broadband bottleneck toll – to access high bandwidth customers, we cannot afford to wait until they actually start doing that before we step in to stop it.

Once they start making money by leveraging that bottleneck position in the marketplace, will a future Congress really stare them down and take that revenue stream away?

Mr. Speaker, if we don’t protect the openness of the Internet for entrepreneurial activity, we’re ruining a wonderful model for low barrier entry, innovation, and job creation. Broadband network owners should not be able to determine who can and who cannot offer services over broadband networks or over the Internet. The detrimental effect to the digital economy would be quite severe if such conduct were permitted and became widespread. The deterioration of significant policies of nondiscrimination by the imposition of artificial bottlenecks by broadband network owners imperil economic growth, innovation, job creation, and First Amendment freedom of expression on such networks.

The Network Neutrality Act of 2006 offers Members a clear choice. It is a choice between favoring the broadband designs of a small handful of very large companies, and safeguarding the dreams of thousands of inventors, entrepreneurs, and small businesses. This legislation is designed to save the Internet and thwart those who seek to fundamentally and detrimentally alter the Internet as we know it. Mr. Speaker, I urge Members to support this bill and urge the House to take a decisive stand in favor of network neutrality."