AT&T helped NSA spy on millions of Americans' private calls, emails
The relationship between AT&T and the NSA is said to be "highly collaborative," thanks to the company's "extreme willingness to help."
AT&T is the latest US company said to have worked closely with the National Security Agency to conduct massive domestic and international surveillance.
Newly published documents published Saturday, provided by Edward Snowden in 2013, show the US cellular and telecom giant was in cahoots with the intelligence agency as far back as 1985, a relationship that later intensified following the September 11 terrorist attacks.
The report is long, and there are more than 70 pages to digest.
Here some of the snippets from the ProPublica-New York Times report:
AT&T is "Fairview"? We may never truly know
NSA is codename heavy for a reason: it mitigates damage in case of information leaks. It's long been suspected that US telcos, large and small, have on some level "cooperated" with the NSA, whether willingly or otherwise. There are dozens of codenames for different companies, and collections and programs under which that collected data is filtered and stored.
One of the larger programs is Fairview, which reporters are now saying can be no other than AT&T, based on new evidence that's come to light.
It's also worth noting that former NSA whistleblower William Binney told me in New York some months ago that "Fairview" was AT&T, and "Stormbrew" was Verizon. Another one of these programs, "Oakstar," collects data from companies in eight countries that are not part of the Five Eyes coalition. Binney left the agency in 2001.
Some of these codenames are considered "sensitive compartmented information," meaning even some NSA officials aren't sure who's who. The NSA's partners or collaborators in the private sector remain a huge state secret.
NSA used AT&T to spy on the United Nations
From the report, AT&T "provided technical assistance in carrying out a secret court order permitting the wiretapping of all Internet communications at the United Nations headquarters," which is a customer of AT&T.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/att-phone-provider-tapped-networks-helped-nsa/