Posted on 04/28/2006 9:15:43 PM PDT by lainie
DOJ Will Assert Military and State Secrets Privilege and Request Dismissal of Lawsuit
San Francisco - The United States government filed a "Statement of Interest" Friday in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF's) class-action lawsuit against AT&T, announcing that the government would "assert the military and state secrets privilege" and "intervene to seek dismissal" of the case.
EFF's lawsuit accuses AT&T of collaborating with the National Security Agency in its massive surveillance program. EFF's evidence regarding AT&T's dragnet surveillance of its networks, currently filed under seal, includes a declaration by Mark Klein, a retired AT&T telecommunications technician, and several internal AT&T documents. This evidence was bolstered and explained by the expert opinion of J. Scott Marcus, who served as Senior Advisor for Internet Technology to the Federal Communications Commission from July 2001 until July 2005
Much of the evidence in the case is currently under seal, as AT&T claims public release of the documents would expose trade secrets. A hearing on the issue is scheduled for May 17th.
For the full Statement of Interest:
http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/att/USA_statement_of_interest.pdf
For more on EFF's suit:
http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/att/
Contact:
Rebecca Jeschke
Media Coordinator
Electronic Frontier Foundation
press@eff.org
Posted at 04:12 PM
"Every peering circuit that touches AT&T, every connection to their customer's aggregation router has optical taps. These taps are then connected to a separate network which consists of Juniper routers with specific physical interface cards made to do passive monitoring. This data is then transported to various data mining facilities across the country for analysis."
Transcribed from a podcast found here:
Being a professional paranoiac for the last 10 or 12 years, this doesn't surprise me in the least.
My inner geek wants technical details. That's a lot of data to be handling, I'll guess they're not appending to a log file that has
tail -f logfile | grep osama
running on it :)
The NSA is only allowed to snoop traffic entering/leaving the country.
They also snoop phone calls, as leaked to the NYT. 70% of the public agrees that this is a good thing.
A single fiber or fiber pair, can handle at least 16 "wavelengths" (essentially 16 different connections) using DWDM.
Figure that each wavelength is good for a (current state of the art) 10Gbps connection.
That single strand of fiber can carry 160Gbps of traffic! And, fiber networks such as ATT's will have buried cables or cables hanging from telephone poles that will have anywhere from 6 pairs of fiber, to 144 (denser areas like in a city).
To peel off a strand and dedicate it to the gov't in each case, would be relatively easy.
Keep in mind that a single 10Gbps connection will handle approximately (allowing for some overhead) one of A) all of the traffic of Earthlink or AOL at any given time B) all of the traffic of Comcast high speed internet C) the voice traffic of 144,000 or more, simultaneous phone calls.
The amusing thing here is that various foreign governments are already in the US...and probably monitoring your phones. Simple scenario...Chinese government wants inside scoop on Bill Gates. They get a really smart kid in China to apply for educational program in the US...in telecommunications of course. The kid ends up with the PHd crowd and does work on the side for AT&T up in the Washington state area. The company is surprised how well he delivers and very professional attitude. They eventually allow him a few extra privelages...and he goes to work...installing an extra route or two that allows access to a number of features within the phone network of Washington state. He can leave now....go home...because the 2nd team is on station. Their job is to use his entrance path...and isolate Bill Gate's numbers...catching data and voices as they find it. The phone company really isn't smart enough to figure this out...and NSA isn't really looking for a inside-the-US surveillance group. And the FBI? They might be smart enough...but someone would have to make an error to get them involved in the case and start putting things together.
Its really not the FBI or NSA guys you should worry about messing with your telephone lines and listening in...lots of other foreign governments are probably already doing it.
No outrage over blanket, all-encompassing surveillance; no particular acknowledgement of the duplicity of AT&T. 'K.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
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