NSA & AT&T are BFFs

[Neonmoon 38130]

https://theintercept.com/2018/06/25/att-internet-nsa-spy-hubs/

NSA using AT&T to spy on you. 

Spoiler

 

THE SECRETS ARE hidden behind fortified walls in cities across the United States, inside towering, windowless skyscrapers and fortress-like concrete structures that were built to withstand earthquakes and even nuclear attack. Thousands of people pass by the buildings each day and rarely give them a second glance, because their function is not publicly known. They are an integral part of one of the world’s largest telecommunications networks – and they are also linked to a controversial National Security Agency surveillance program.

Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. In each of these cities, The Intercept has identified an AT&T facility containing networking equipment that transports large quantities of internet traffic across the United States and the world. A body of evidence – including classified NSA documents, public records, and interviews with several former AT&T employees – indicates that the buildings are central to an NSA spying initiative that has for years monitored billions of emails, phone calls, and online chats passing across U.S. territory.

The NSA considers AT&T to be one of its most trusted partners and has lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.” It is a collaboration that dates back decades. Little known, however, is that its scope is not restricted to AT&T’s customers. According to the NSA’s documents, it values AT&T not only because it “has access to information that transits the nation,” but also because it maintains unique relationships with other phone and internet providers. The NSA exploits these relationships for surveillance purposes, commandeering AT&T’s massive infrastructure and using it as a platform to covertly tap into communications processed by other companies.

 

 

https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/25/nsa-att-intercept-surveillance/

Spoiler

 

AT&T collaborates on NSA spying through a web of secretive buildings in the US

Taylor Hatmaker@tayhatmaker / 23 hours ago

 Comment

A new report from The Intercept sheds light on the NSA’s close relationship with communications provider AT&T.

The Intercept identified eight facilities across the U.S. that function as hubs for AT&T’s  efforts to collaborate with the intelligence agency. The site first identified one potential hub of this kind in 2017 in lower Manhattan.

The report reveals that eight AT&T data facilities in the U.S. are regarded as high-value sites to the NSA for giving the agency direct “backbone” access to raw data that passes through, including emails, web browsing, social media and any other form of unencrypted online activity. The NSA uses the web of eight AT&T hubs for a surveillance operation code-named FAIRVIEW, a program previously reported by The New York Times. The program, first established in 1985, “involves tapping into international telecommunications cables, routers, and switches” and only coordinates directly with AT&T and not the other major U.S. mobile carriers.

AT&T’s deep involvement with the NSA monitoring program operated under the code name SAGUARO. Messaging, email and other web traffic accessed through the program was made searchable through XKEYSCORE, one of the NSA’s more infamous search-powered surveillance tools.

The Intercept explains how those sites give the NSA access to data beyond just AT&T subscribers:

The data exchange between AT&T and other networks initially takes place outside AT&T’s control, sources said, at third-party data centers that are owned and operated by companies such as California’s Equinix. But the data is then routed – in whole or in part – through the eight AT&T buildings, where the NSA taps into it. By monitoring what it calls the “peering circuits” at the eight sites, the spy agency can collect “not only AT&T’s data, they get all the data that’s interchanged between AT&T’s network and other companies,” according to Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician who worked with the company for 22 years.

The NSA describes these locations as “peering link router complex” sites while AT&T calls them “Service Node Routing Complexes” (SNRCs). The eight complexes are spread across the nation’s major cities, with locations in Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C. The Intercept report identifies these facilities:

Among the pinpointed buildings, there is a nuclear blast-resistant, windowless facility in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood; in Washington, D.C., a fortress-like, concrete structure less than half a mile south of the U.S. Capitol; in Chicago, an earthquake-resistant skyscraper in the West Loop Gate area; in Atlanta, a 429-foot art deco structure in the heart of the city’s downtown district; and in Dallas, a cube-like building with narrow windows and large vents on its exterior, located in the Old East district.

… in downtown Los Angeles, a striking concrete tower near the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Staples Center, two blocks from the most important internet exchange in the region; in Seattle, a 15-story building with blacked-out windows and reinforced concrete foundations, near the city’s waterfront; and in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood, a building where it was previously claimed that the NSA was monitoring internet traffic from a secure room on the sixth floor.

While these facilities could allow for the monitoring of domestic U.S. traffic, they also process vast quantities of international traffic as it moves across the globe — a fact that likely explains why the NSA would view these AT&T nodes as such high-value sites. The original documents, part of the leaked files provided by Edward Snowden,  are available in the original report.

 

Apparently this was noticed in NY a couple years ago. 

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/new-yorks-nsa-listening-station-is-hiding-in-plain-sight.html

Spoiler

 

If you’ve spent any time in New York, you’ve seen it: The skyscraper formerly known as the AT&T Long Lines Building at 33 Thomas Street in Lower Manhattan. Whereas other skyscrapers light up when night falls, the Long Lines Building stays dark, a pitch-black cutout in an otherwise glittering skyline. While other iconic New York buildings are shining towers of glass, this one is all dull-gray concrete, 29 floors and no windows.

For most New Yorkers, the Long Lines Building is just a curiosity, another pretty-ugly part of our city, easy to ignore and better for it. Now, owing to a report in the Intercept, you won’t be able to look at it the same way again.

Long-known to the public as a major communications hub, owned by AT&T and run by its local subsidiary the New York Telephone Company, thanks to NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, we now know that the Long Lines Building is also a top-secret NSA listening station code-named TITANPOINTE.

The Long Lines Building, it turns out, is forgettable because it was designed to be forgettable. It was also designed — by the architectural firm John Carl Warnecke & Associates — to withstand a nuclear bomb, and protect 1,500 people for two weeks from toxic radiation.

In a long-form investigation, the Intercept was able to combine revelations about the NSA’s surveillance program made public in Edward Snowden’s leak “together with architectural plans, public records, and interviews with former AT&T employees” to bring to light this secret hub of international espionage hiding in plain sight.

According to the report, “the code name TITANPOINTE features dozens of times in the NSA documents, often in classified reports about surveillance operations,” and often in partnership with another code name, LITHIUM, already known to be AT&T.

AT&T’s partnership with U.S. government surveillance programs is already well-known.

According to former AT&T engineers with knowledge of the program, the building is home to one of the United States’ major “gateway switches,” which routes international calls from the United States to countries all over the world.

Top-secret NSA memos leaked by Snowden seem to suggest that the NSA has been able to listen in to these calls directly from a secret site within the building. If these revelations are true, the Long Lines Building is also likely the major venue where now infamous surveillance programs targeting the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and close U.S. allies like Germany and Japan were staged.

Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the liberty and national-security program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told the Intercept:

This is yet more proof that our communications service providers have become, whether willingly or unwillingly, an arm of the surveillance state. The NSA is presumably operating under authorities that enable it to target foreigners, but the fact that it is so deeply embedded in our domestic communications infrastructure should tip people off that the effects of this kind of surveillance cannot be neatly limited to non-Americans.

It looks like big brother has been living in New York City all along. He just has a really ugly apartment.

 

I know Houston wasn't mentioned as a site in the original article but there is one of these buidlings on Richmond & Weslayan Street. 

3303 Weslayan Street, Houston Texas, 77027

 

[Doc Holliday 199]

So what's new?  They are in bed with most of the major tech companies...

[Hagbard Celine 11113]

James Bamford, Puzzle Palace, 1982: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puzzle_Palace

Bill Binney resigns 30 october 2001, blows whistle september 2002: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_(intelligence_official)

Room 641A, 2003 goes in to operation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

2005: Binney arrested in his shower by FBI agents who came in heavy after NY Times expose on warrantless eavesdropping

2006: Room 641A exposed

Winter 12/13: Clapper lies his lizard ass off to congress

6 June 2013: Snowden

Puzzle Palace, Stone's film Snowden, and Poitars' documentary Citizen Four, in that order, will get you caught up

 

"May we live in interesting times"

[bernorange 8380]

Yeah, this isn't exactly news to anyone who read about Snowden's disclosures in The Guardian.  I expect the NSA has tentacles in every major cell phone company including Verizon, Sprint, et. al.   It's known that Google, Facebook, Microsoft, et. al. were/are their puppets too.

[Hagbard Celine 11113]

They have everything.

Every.

Thing.

Live your life with the knowledge that every time you fap or fuck you are making porn for the boys.  Once you get past that, you'll be fine.

[Monster 219]

People under the age of 18 don't even understand the concept of privacy.    I read recently that there's laws making it illegal to manufacture a phone with a removable battery.  The batteries must be fused into place...because our lawmakers don't want us capable of turning off our phones.  (Powering it off just puts it into standby mode.) 

Worst part of it, is that, it's not just the NSA/government that has access.   

 

 

[Monster 219]

Have you guys seen the  video of voice reproduction software?  Software that takes a selection of your spoken words and extrapolates full sentences of their choosing...   Now consider that you're talking into a recording device every time you talk on the phone.  If phone companies, or the NSA, or a high bidder, decide to create a database of your words, ready to be extrapolated into whatever they feel like typing...they can.  The technology exists right now.  

So, the NSA knowing what pron you watch is hardly the biggest thing to worry about. 

 

[Hagbard Celine 11113]

i wish the deathstar would use some of that technology to fix their fucking voice recognition software.

[El Diablo 4232]

On ‎9‎/‎6‎/‎2018 at 3:46 AM, Monster said:

Have you guys seen the  video of voice reproduction software?  Software that takes a selection of your spoken words and extrapolates full sentences of their choosing...   Now consider that you're talking into a recording device every time you talk on the phone.  If phone companies, or the NSA, or a high bidder, decide to create a database of your words, ready to be extrapolated into whatever they feel like typing...they can.  The technology exists right now.  

So, the NSA knowing what pron you watch is hardly the biggest thing to worry about. 

 

I'm pretty sure that this was done years ago with Ronald Reagan during his last bit in office.