AT&T Helped N.S.A. Spy on an Array of Internet Traffic
AT&T Helped N.S.A. Spy on an Array of Internet
Traffic
AUG. 15, 2015
This story was reported by Julia Angwin, Charlie Savage,
Jeff Larson, Henrik Moltke, Laura Poitras and James Risen.
The National Security Agency’s ability to spy on vast
quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States has relied on
its extraordinary, decades-long partnership with a single company: the telecom
giant AT&T.
While it has been long known that American
telecommunications companies worked closely with the spy agency, newly
disclosed N.S.A. documents show that the relationship with AT&T has been
considered unique and especially productive. One document described it as
“highly collaborative,” while another lauded the company’s “extreme willingness
to help.”
AT&T’s cooperation has involved a broad range of
classified activities, according to the documents, which date from 2003 to
2013. AT&T has given the N.S.A. access, through several methods covered
under different legal rules, to billions of emails as they have flowed across
its domestic networks. It provided technical assistance in carrying out a
secret court order permitting the wiretapping of all Internet communications at
the United Nations headquarters, a customer of AT&T.
These National Security Agency documents shed new light
on the agency’s relationship through the years with American telecommunications
companies. They show how the agency’s partnership with AT&T has been
particularly important, enabling it to conduct surveillance, under several
different legal rules, of international and foreign-to-foreign Internet
communications that passed through network hubs on American soil.
The N.S.A.’s top-secret budget in 2013 for the AT&T
partnership was more than twice that of the next-largest such program,
according to the documents. The company installed surveillance equipment in at
least 17 of its Internet hubs on American soil, far more than its similarly
sized competitor, Verizon. And its engineers were the first to try out new
surveillance technologies invented by the eavesdropping agency.
One document reminds N.S.A. officials to be polite when
visiting AT&T facilities, noting, “This is a partnership, not a contractual
relationship.”
The documents, provided by the former agency contractor
Edward J. Snowden, were jointly reviewed by The New York Times and ProPublica.
The N.S.A., AT&T and Verizon declined to discuss the findings from the
files. “We don’t comment on matters of national security,” an AT&T
spokesman said.
It is not clear if the programs still operate in the same
way today. Since the Snowden revelations set off a global debate over
surveillance two years ago, some Silicon Valley
technology companies have expressed anger at what they characterize as N.S.A.
intrusions and have rolled out new encryption to thwart them. The telecommunications
companies have been quieter, though Verizon unsuccessfully challenged a court
order for bulk phone records in 2014.
At the same time, the government has been fighting in
court to keep the identities of its telecom partners hidden. In a recent case,
a group of AT&T customers claimed that the N.S.A.’s tapping of the Internet
violated the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches. This
year, a federal judge dismissed key portions of the lawsuit after the Obama
administration argued that public discussion of its telecom surveillance
efforts would reveal state secrets, damaging national security.
The N.S.A. documents do not identify AT&T or other
companies by name. Instead, they refer to corporate partnerships run by the
agency’s Special Source Operations division using code names. The division is
responsible for more than 80 percent of the information the N.S.A. collects,
one document states.
Fairview
is one of its oldest programs. It began in 1985, the year after antitrust
regulators broke up the Ma Bell telephone monopoly and its long-distance
division became AT&T Communications. An analysis of the Fairview documents by The Times and
ProPublica reveals a constellation of evidence that points to AT&T as that
program’s partner. Several former intelligence officials confirmed that
finding.
A Fairview fiber-optic
cable, damaged in the 2011 earthquake in Japan, was repaired on the same
date as a Japanese-American cable operated by AT&T. Fairview documents use
technical jargon specific to AT&T. And in 2012, the Fairview program carried out the court order
for surveillance on the Internet line, which AT&T provides, serving the
United Nations headquarters. (N.S.A. spying on United Nations diplomats has
previously been reported, but not the court order or AT&T’s involvement. In
October 2013, the United
States told the United Nations that it would
not monitor its communications.)
The documents also show that another program, code-named
Stormbrew, has included Verizon and the former MCI, which Verizon purchased in
2006. One describes a Stormbrew cable landing that is identifiable as one that
Verizon operates. Another names a contact person whose LinkedIn profile says he
is a longtime Verizon employee with a top-secret clearance.
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, AT&T
and MCI were instrumental in the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping
programs, according to a draft report by the N.S.A.’s inspector general. The
report, disclosed by Mr. Snowden and previously published by The Guardian, does
not identify the companies by name but describes their market share in numbers
that correspond to those two businesses, according to Federal Communications
Commission reports.
AT&T began turning over emails and phone calls
“within days” after the warrantless surveillance began in October 2001, the
report indicated. By contrast, the other company did not start until February
2002, the draft report said.
In September 2003, according to the previously
undisclosed N.S.A. documents, AT&T was the first partner to turn on a new
collection capability that the N.S.A. said amounted to a “ ‘live’ presence on
the global net.” In one of its first months of operation, the Fairview program
forwarded to the agency 400 billion Internet metadata records — which include
who contacted whom and other details, but not what they said — and was
“forwarding more than one million emails a day to the keyword selection system”
at the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Md. Stormbrew was still gearing up
to use the new technology, which appeared to process foreign-to-foreign traffic
separate from the post-9/11 program.
In 2011, AT&T began handing over 1.1 billion domestic
cellphone calling records a day to the N.S.A. after “a push to get this flow
operational prior to the 10th anniversary of 9/11,” according to an internal
agency newsletter. This revelation is striking because after Mr. Snowden
disclosed the program of collecting the records of Americans’ phone calls,
intelligence officials told reporters that, for technical reasons, it consisted
mostly of landline phone records.
That year, one slide presentation shows, the N.S.A. spent
$188.9 million on the Fairview
program, twice the amount spent on Stormbrew, its second-largest corporate
program.
After The Times disclosed the Bush administration’s
warrantless wiretapping program in December 2005, plaintiffs began trying to
sue AT&T and the N.S.A. In a 2006 lawsuit, a retired AT&T technician
named Mark Klein claimed that three years earlier, he had seen a secret room in
a company building in San Francisco
where the N.S.A. had installed equipment.
Mr. Klein claimed that AT&T was providing the N.S.A.
with access to Internet traffic that AT&T transmits for other telecom
companies. Such cooperative arrangements, known in the industry as “peering,”
mean that communications from customers of other companies could end up on
AT&T’s network.
After Congress passed a 2008 law legalizing the Bush
program and immunizing the telecom companies for their cooperation with it,
that lawsuit was thrown out. But the newly disclosed documents show that
AT&T has provided access to peering traffic from other companies’ networks.
AT&T’s “corporate relationships provide unique
accesses to other telecoms and I.S.P.s,” or Internet service providers, one
2013 N.S.A. document states.
Because of the way the Internet works, intercepting a
targeted person’s email requires copying pieces of many other people’s emails,
too, and sifting through those pieces. Plaintiffs have been trying without
success to get courts to address whether copying and sifting pieces of all
those emails violates the Fourth Amendment.
Many privacy advocates have suspected that AT&T was
giving the N.S.A. a copy of all Internet data to sift for itself. But one 2012
presentation says the spy agency does not “typically” have “direct access” to
telecoms’ hubs. Instead, the telecoms have done the sifting and forwarded
messages the government believes it may legally collect.
“Corporate sites are often controlled by the partner, who
filters the communications before sending to N.S.A.,” according to the
presentation. This system sometimes leads to “delays” when the government sends
new instructions, it added.
The companies’ sorting of data has allowed the N.S.A. to
bring different surveillance powers to bear. Targeting someone on American soil
requires a court order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. When a
foreigner abroad is communicating with an American, that law permits the
government to target that foreigner without a warrant. When foreigners are
messaging other foreigners, that law does not apply and the government can collect
such emails in bulk without targeting anyone.
AT&T’s provision of foreign-to-foreign traffic has
been particularly important to the N.S.A. because large amounts of the world’s
Internet communications travel across American cables. AT&T provided access
to the contents of transiting email traffic for years before Verizon began
doing so in March 2013, the documents show. They say AT&T gave the N.S.A.
access to “massive amounts of data,” and by 2013 the program was processing 60
million foreign-to-foreign emails a day.
Because domestic wiretapping laws do not cover
foreign-to-foreign emails, the companies have provided them voluntarily, not in
response to court orders, intelligence officials said. But it is not clear
whether that remains the case after the post-Snowden upheavals.
“We do not voluntarily provide information to any
investigating authorities other than if a person’s life is in danger and time
is of the essence,” Brad Burns, an AT&T spokesman, said. He declined to
elaborate.
By Julia Angwin, Charlie Savage, Jeff Larson, Henrik
Moltke, Laura Poitras and James Risen
Julia Angwin and Jeff Larson report for ProPublica.
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