NSA, AT&T Intertwine to Form Surveillance Web Over US

[dufus]

Among the hundreds of properties owned by leading telecommunications giant AT&T across the United States, at least eight are being used by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to suck up billions of records from internet and cell phone users that don’t even have a contract with the company.

The huge amounts of the NSA's Data collection comes from "peering" sites, which are used to process data from AT&T customers and also often serve as a midpoint for data generated from other companies because they're often a more direct or more cost-effective route. Due to the pervasiveness of US telecom infrastructure, huge amounts of global traffic makes its way in through US borders. Meanwhile, AT&T runs 19,500 "points of presence" in 149 countries. 

© NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY / INTERCEPT

Internal NSA document details how the US functions as a "backbone" to the world's telecommunications.

 

These "peering" sites enable the NSA to collect "not only AT&T's data, they get all the data that's interchanged between AT&T's network and other companies," Mark Klein, a former AT&T line technician at the company's San Francisco office, told the Intercept. Klein blew the whistle in 2006 on the NSA's installation of eavesdropping hardware in a room in its building in San Francisco.

The NSA's collaboration through the data-gathering program, codenamed FAIRVIEW, is reportedly confined to AT&T. However, some of the facilities used by AT&T are shared facilities that also provide services to other telecom firms like Verizon.

 

 

The eight sites, which are located in Washington, DC, Seattle, San Francisco, New York City, Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago and Atlanta, form a "common backbone" through which a massive amount of jointly used data travels, the Intercept reported Monday.

Neither the NSA nor AT&T would confirm the Intercept's reporting, although a number of former AT&T employees did, and the spy agency praised the company for its "extremely willingness to help." The revelations come from documents exposing FAIRVIEW that were leaked to Intercept editor Glenn Greenwald by whistleblower Edward Snowden in May 2013.

In the documents, the spy agency said the company was even "aggressively involved" in supporting the data collection program. Under the FAIRVIEW program, both organizations worked hand-in-hand to create a communications ranking system that flags information and relays it to the government.

 

 

According to the spy agency, the program is a "cooperative effort" with a "partner [that] operates in the US, but has access to information that transits the nation and through its corporate relationships provide unique access to other telecoms and [internet service providers]."

Among the "unique aspects" clarifying the program's capabilities is "access to massive amounts of data," formerly secret NSA documents show.

The eight sites were developed under the guidance of an engineer by the name of Hossein Eslambolchi, a former chief technology officer at the company. He told The Intercept that the company had asked him to create the "largest internet protocol network in the world."

Filtering equipment is also installed on AT&T's networks to keep US citizens' data out of the government's hands, as it would be unconstitutional for the agency to review Americans' data without a warrant. 

 

 

However, in 2005 under former President George W Bush's administration, the agency was caught doing just that, the New York Times reported. Bush signed an order in 2002 that gave the NSA sweeping powers to eavesdrop on phone calls of people inside the US as part of an effort to track "dirty numbers" linked to terrorist groups. Meanwhile, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA) allows the government to obtain Americans' records so long as it is "incidental" to the targeting of foreigners.

That's allowed the NSA's limited technology to soak up and store a vast amount of information. For instance, the database is designed to target "selectors," like a name, IP address or phone number that is included on an NSA target list. When it finds the mention of one, the NSA "will acquire a copy of the entire inbox," an NSA memo released by the Intercept states.

https://sputniknews.com/us/201806261065774072-NSA-ATT-Surveillance-Web-US/

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

[tao]

It's quite an old partnership. 

[dufus]

I probably should start in the late '80s, because that's when the communications and the world started ballooning with cell phones and email and the Internet. And it really started growing in the early '90s.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/government-elections-politics/united-states-of-secrets/the-frontline-interview-william-binney/

[steven36]

Nice post but i posted it already 7 hours ago

[steven36]

4 hours ago, dufus said:

I probably should start in the late '80s, because that's when the communications and the world started ballooning with cell phones and email and the Internet. And it really started growing in the early '90s.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/government-elections-politics/united-states-of-secrets/the-frontline-interview-william-binney/

 After I researched  it this is not even new news . All this stuff the the intercept posted about today and try to make a big deal of  Wired and other sites done posted about it all before in 2012 it's just rehash stuff they coped from 2012

https://publicintelligence.net/nsa-domestic-collection-points/

https://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1/

 

This news being public knowledge  is older than when Snowdon leaked that info even.

 i read about alot those buildings date back to  1950s and was always shared with the military   .

 

I bet they not even using that old shit no more and are in new buildings hooked to fiber land line is about dead  so why they be using this old tech? Even the info Snowden  had when he released it was old when he released and that was 2013  you think the NSA  is dumb enough to  use buildings and stuff that every Nation state has a record on?  Sure the NSA communizations go threw the internet and phone systems but i doubt there anything but   shared federal government telecom circuits and the NSA are somewhere else .

[steven36]

2 hours ago, steven36 said:

I bet they not even using that old shit no more and are in new buildings hooked to fiber land line is about dead  so why they be using this old tech?

Quote

 

The National Security Agency has moved most of its mission data into the Intelligence Community GovCloud. June 22, 2018

 

The National Security Agency has moved most of the mission data it collects, analyzes and stores into a classified cloud computing environment known as the Intelligence Community GovCloud.

 

The IC GovCloud is a single integrated “big data fusion environment” that allows analysts to rapidly “connect the dots” across all NSA’s data sources, according to Chief Information Officer Greg Smithberger.

 

The impetus for the multi-year move is getting the NSA’s data, including signals intelligence and other foreign surveillance and intelligence information it ingests from multiple repositories around the globe into a single data lake analysts from the NSA and other IC agencies can run queries against.

 

“The NSA has been systematically moving almost all its mission into this big data fusion environment,” Smithberger told Nextgov in an interview. “Right now, almost all NSA’s mission is being done in [IC GovCloud], and the productivity gains and the speed at which our analysts are able to put together insights and work higher-level problems has been really amazing.”

 

Smithberger said the IC GovCloud environment accelerates the analytic work humans can do by employing machine learning and algorithms. Data ingested by NSA has been meta-tagged with bits of information, including where it came from and who is authorized to see it, which ensures analysts only immerse themselves in intelligence they’re cleared to see.

 

“This environment allows us to run analytic tools and do machine-assisted data fusion and big data analytics, and apply a lot of automation to facilitate and accelerate what humans would like to do, and get the machines to do it for them,” Smithberger said. Analysts, he said, can “interactively ask questions” of the data in the cloud environment, and it spits out data in “humanly readable form.”

The backbone of the system is the same commercial hardware you might see in data centers owned by Facebook, Amazon or other industry titans. But that hardware is blended with NSA-developed custom software, exotic processing, high performance computing and other unique NSA intellectual property.

 

“It’s really a hybrid of the latest and greatest commercial technology, but a lot of custom NSA technology and a lot of unique development we’ve done to actually create these outcomes,” Smithberger said.

 

While the IC GovCloud is NSA’s creation–and centrally funded by the NSA–its basic services are available to the 16 other agencies that comprise the IC, including the Central Intelligence Agency and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

 

IC GovCloud is one of two major cloud initiatives across the IC. Four years ago, the CIA awarded a $600 million contract to Amazon Web Services to develop a commercial cloud environment for the IC agencies. Today, the Amazon-developed C2S provides utility computing services the IC.

 

https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2018/06/nsa-systematically-moving-all-its-data-cloud/149184/?oref=d_brief_nl

 

There servers in the cloud are on  Amazon Web Services

[dufus]

NSA Purges Hundreds of Millions of Call and Text Records

 

The National Security Agency has purged hundreds of millions of records logging phone calls and texts that it had gathered from U.S. telecommunications companies since 2015.

 

the agency has disclosed. It had realized that its database was contaminated with some files the agency had no authority to receive.

 

https://www.wral.com/nsa-purges-hundreds-of-millions-of-call-and-text-records/17665337/

 

purge get rid i think

 

 

[Archanus]

On 6/25/2018 at 8:11 PM, steven36 said:

Nice post but i posted it already 7 hours ago

 

jajaja you always with the lastest news jaja  Are you journalist ?? jaja

[Crazycanuk]

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