Is this A joke,God I hope so?

Post subject: Is this A joke,God I hope so?


AT&T Forwards ALL Internet Traffic Into NSA Says EFF
AT&T Forwards ALL Internet Traffic Into NSA Says EFF (link)
San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on Wednesday filed the legal briefs and evidence supporting its motion for a preliminary injunction in its class-action lawsuit against AT&T. After asking EFF to hold back the documents so that it could review them, the Department of Justice consented to EFF's filing them under seal — a well-established procedure that prohibits public access and permits only the judge and the litigants to see the evidence. While not a party to the case, the government was concerned that even this procedure would not provide sufficient security and has represented to the Court that it is "presently considering whether and, if so, how it will participate in this case."
"The evidence that we are filing supports our claim that AT&T is diverting Internet traffic into the hands of the NSA wholesale, in violation of federal wiretapping laws and the Fourth Amendment," said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "More than just threatening individuals' privacy, AT&T's apparent choice to give the government secret, direct access to millions of ordinary Americans' Internet communications is a threat to the Constitution itself. We are asking the Court to put a stop to it now."
EFF's evidence regarding AT&T's dragnet surveillance of its networks 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 Technical Advisor for Internet Technology to the Federal Communications Commission from July 2001 until July 2005.
The internal AT&T documents and portions of the supporting declarations have been submitted to the Court under a tentative seal, a procedure that allows AT&T five court days to explain to the Court why the information should be kept from the public.
"The public deserves to know about AT&T's illegal program," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "In an abundance of caution, we are providing AT&T with an opportunity to explain itself before this material goes on the public docket, but we believe that justice will ultimately require full disclosure."
The NSA program came to light in December, when the New York Times reported that the President had authorized the agency to intercept telephone and Internet communications inside the United States without the authorization of any court. Over the ensuing weeks, it became clear that the NSA program has been intercepting and analyzing millions of Americans' communications, with the help of the country's largest phone and Internet companies, including AT&T.
"Mark Klein is a true American hero," said EFF Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl. "He has bravely come forward with information critical for proving AT&T's involvement with the government's invasive surveillance program."
In the lawsuit, EFF is representing the class of all AT&T residential customers nationwide. Working with EFF in the lawsuit are the law firms Traber & Voorhees, Lerach Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins LLP and the Law Office of Richard R. Wiebe
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mistermandingo wrote:
No. This is a joke:



And this is in the news, God knows what happens in secret.
I still can't believe why there are no huge protests agians the US laws that make this possible, the so-called "patriotic act".
To me as an European it's so obvious those laws make dictatorship legal, but hey, I don't live there...

Holy paranoia Batman

I'd like to make a few points. First of all, if AT&T is forwarding all their traffic through the NSA, they can do it without legal recourse from the consumer. As a company, they are not bound by government regulations and can do whatever they want with the data that flows through their lines.

Second of all, the NSA certainly has the capability to reconstruct and read anything that flows through Internet servers in America and probably other countries as well. The Internet is NOT a secure network and never has been. The NSA does not need AT&T's support to do their job.

In the grand scheme of things, this little news item is really not so big. In fact, it has only been reported by smaller web sites and has not reached any major news services yet. Hey maybe the news services are invloved in this operation too.

Oh look at that. There's a black helicopter landing outside on my lawn...

Elmo wrote:
Don't know much about the US law system, but in Europe, when I post a letter in a closed envelope, the posting company has no right to open and read it. It's not their property.

I think there are distinct differences with electronic media that will require changes to existing laws. Redirecting a data stream, or even peeking at it is not the same as opening and reading an envelope. Perhaps it should be.

The problem is that the Internet is a world-wide WEB. Data flows from point to point along routes that are difficult to predict. Anywhere along that route, someone can "sniff" the data packets and no one is the wiser. Is it illegal to "sniff" the electrons flowing on public lines? Maybe. Maybe not. Is AT&T allowed to determine the route taken by data flowing through its proprietary lines? Absolutely yes. Can they examine data packets in their system? Again, absolutely yes.

My point is that AT&T may be making it easier for the NSA, but they are probably not breaking any law on their own.

I have never been a big fan of the NSA cause they gave the stargate program so much trouble but like usual jack, sam, daniel and tilk always won. but still makes you dislike the NSA.

and havent you guys ever heard or project Echelon?

heres a newspaper story about the NSA listening stations in england.


March 18, 2005
Patrick Keefe '05 Investigates SigInt in Chatter

Yale Law School student Patrick Radden Keefe, author of the newly released book Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping, says that there were similarities between trying to research the workings of the National Security Agency, the bureau of the U.S. government that focuses on signals intelligence, and intelligence work itself.

"The cliche about intelligence is that you're connecting the dots," says Keefe. "You take a data set that's incomplete and draw from that various conclusions--and that was very much my experience, that I had to cobble together all the stuff we know."

The NSA operates in secrecy, refusing even to disclose its annual budget. When Keefe visited a large listening station in England (he describes it as an "extraordinary moonbase of an eavesdropping station smack in the middle of the English countryside"), he wasn't allowed past the front gate. He interviewed former intelligence agents, experts in communications technology, politicians, and conspiracy theorists, but the NSA wouldn't answer any of his questions.

But Keefe was able to pull together his dots obliquely. When he couldn't get into the listening station in England, he went to a local pub and talked with people who had worked at the base. Then he went to the U.S. Patent Office. He explains that in the last twenty years, the NSA has started patenting some of the technologies they develop. These patents gave Keefe a glimpse of the agency's activities. For instance, he knew that terrorist groups have used a technology called steganography to conceal encrypted messages in images on websites. "If I had gone to the NSA and said, 'Is that a problem for you guys? Is that something you're thinking about?' they never would have told me anything. But if you go to the USPTO, they actually have patents, and the title of the patent is something like 'method for extracting text implicit in site images.'"

Keefe adds, "The second sense in which it was like intelligence work is that you're always worried about reliability. The agencies will never come out and actively debunk any kind of a story--they just always stay silent. There are all kinds of paranoid cranky weirdos out there who will tell you all kinds of nutty things."

Keefe began this challenging avenue of investigation several years ago, when he was a graduate student in England. He read accounts of a European Union investigation into a surveillance system run by the U.S., the U.K., and several other countries, called Echelon. He was captivated by reports that he said sounded like a "conspiracy theory." Echelon was supposedly capable of capturing millions of communications every hour, but it operated in near-total secrecy, so that no one in the public really knew what it was. "There's nothing that sparks your interest quite like being told that there's a big thing that you can't know about," Keefe says.

From the moment he began investigating Echelon, Keefe figured he would never know everything he wanted to about it. However, he says, "There were so many questions and they were so compelling and important that they were worth raising." For example, Keefe notes that the system raised international relations questions, as the British had data protection obligations as part of the EU but also participated in Echelon. Echelon clearly threatened individual privacy and raised questions around how much secrecy democratic governments should be able to maintain in the name of national security.

Keefe continued his investigations after starting Law School in 2001. And some of his courses shaped his understanding of the issues underlying Echelon and the use of signals intelligence. A class on the Fourth Amendment taught by Kate Stith, Lafayette S. Foster Professor of Law, led Keefe to consider "the intersection of theoretical and technical interpretations of privacy." One paper he wrote became a part of his book proposal, and a legislation class helped him understand how laws could be crafted to properly regulate intelligence activities--or fail in that role.

After five years studying the secret workings of the NSA, Keefe has a new understanding of what privacy means today. "When you really spend time among the people who are advancing surveillance technology at the ground level, it's extraordinary what they're doing. And you can't help but wonder if this technology continues unabated, what kind of a society we'll be living in.... There's this slightly unholy marriage right now between private research and development companies ... and defense and intelligence agencies that are terrified and will pretty much throw money at anything that might in any way avert another attack. But I think the result is some ill-considered programs that will pretty radically undermine privacy as we've traditionally thought of it."

In addition, the nature of privacy is changing as people conduct more and more of their lives online. "We now conceive of identity and communication in a radically different way," says Keefe. And he argues that these changes are accelerating too fast for scholarly understanding or the law to keep up. At the same time, it's also a challenge for the intelligence agencies. "On the one hand it's a great opportunity for them that people put so much online," says Keefe. "It's not just your phone calls anymore, it's what you do on Google, and how you pay your bills, who you instant message. So it's a big opportunity for them but they're so overwhelmed by the quantity."

Once again Keefe identifies a similarity between his research and intelligence work. He describes searching for information about Echelon on the internet and finding millions of pages that discuss it, including reliable sources and sources that postulate the involvement of extraterrestrials. "The problem with the internet is that there's such profusion of stuff that it's really hard to gauge what you should trust," he says. But he hopes that Chatter, an old-fashioned book, will provide an authoritative resource.

oh and dont forget to check out projet Echelon

http://fly.hiwaay.net/~pspoole/echelon.html

Elmo wrote:Unfortunately you're right.
On one hand the fact that in the "land of the brave and free" fear dictates your actions is the problem of the US citizenz. If their focus on "security" drives them to allow the possession of guns and the legislation of government control and all that, let them.
But the Internet-web-world is sort of an American state where ultimately US laws apply. So on the other hand it does concern me a lot. Cause I spend quite some time on the US-invented WWW....

More reading than school , LOL

And you're all right. The conundrum is "what to do about it", and that is taken care of nicely by the jihad and all the attendant baggage. All of us are being roundly fucked not by greedy capitalists, but by greedy capitalists fueled by religious fundamentalists. The inmates are in charge, and reason is out of season.
For myself, I remain engaged, and refuse to bury my head in the sand, no matter how tempting that prospect seems.