Did Verizon build a fiber optic cable to give feds access?

That's the allegation contained in a class action lawsuit, and it was reported by no less than the New York Times in 2007. Business Insider noted this and other troubling information on the possible magnitude of NSA spying on Americans.

Over the weekend James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times - who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for this story on the NSA gaining the cooperation of U.S. telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to customer data - mentioned a detail from 2007 (emphasis ours):
In Virginia, a telecommunications consultant reported, Verizon had set up a dedicated fiber-optic line running from New Jersey to Quantico, Va., home to a large military base, allowing government officials to gain access to all communications flowing through the carrier's operations center. (snip)
The news about the Verizon-NSA fiber optic connection came from a class action lawsuit brought by a former AT&T engineer who worked on a proposal to give the the NSA access to all the global phone and email traffic that ran through an AT&T network center in Bedminster, N.J.
The Israeli hardware, which can record data that comes through an internet protocol network, was discovered by a former AT&T engineer named Mark Klein and confirmed by former NSA senior executive Thomas Drake.
Another former NSA employee named William Binney, who, like Snowden, believes the NSA's surveillance has gone too far, says that ever since 9/11 the NSA has been hoarding electronic data - phone calls, GPS information, emails, social media, banking and travel records, entire government databases - and analyzes, in real time, "all of the attributes that any individual has" in addition to making networks of connections between individuals.

We are citizens, not subjects. I think it is time we citizens demand that all of our employees in the upper level of government be controlled by listening devices and cameras streamed in real time to the Internet 24/7 while they collect a paycheck from us. If we owned fast food restaurants and employees were not trustworthy under law we could watch them, why not Congress, the President, and all upper level decision makers at the federal level?

I live in the foothills of N. Ca.
My daughter and I were going into the town south of us.
On the way we ran into traffic control.
Oh heck, what are they doing now. The roads had been resurfaced not that long ago.
On the return trip I got out of the car and walked up to the flager since it was a 10 minute wait and asked what was going on.
He said fiber optic cable was going in.
Who for I wonder - the birds?
So I asked.
For the government was the answer.

Verizon was under court order. No choice but to comply.

BS. They wanted the government contract. They didn't appeal the order because they wanted the income and didn't give a damn what the government was going to do to their customers.

In essence all these internet and communications firms are in bed with the Federal Government. They have to be. If they don't lie down with the dogs, then someone else will. If they don't cooperate, then they will join everyone else on the "enemies list".

I wasn’t saying they weren’t under a court order. I was saying that it was BS that they had to comply. They could have appealed the order on the grounds that it violated their privacy contract that they had with their customers.

When you call Verizon for anything, you hear a message about how much they value their customer’s privacy. What a load of BS. They value the government contracts more than their customers’ privacy. After all, their biggest customer is the government.

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