Wednesday, February 01, 2006
EFF sues AT&T for NSA SNAFU
AT&T needs to put a sign on its door that reads, "Come Back With a Warrant," says EFF attorney Kurt Opsahl.
But Nooooo. The new AT&T thinks itself a proxy for a federal administration run amok. The Battle of the Acronyms is joined.
In the suit filed Tuesday, EFF is representing the class of all AT&T customers nationwide. EFF is seeking an injunction to stop AT&T participation in the illegal NSA program, as well as billions of dollars in damages for violation of federal privacy laws.snip (and tuck)
"The NSA program is apparently the biggest fishing expedition ever devised, scanning millions of ordinary Americans' phone calls and emails for 'suspicious' patterns, and it's the collaboration of US telecom companies like AT&T that makes it possible," said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "When the government defends spying on Americans by saying, 'If you're talking to terrorists we want to know about it,' that's not even close to the whole story."snip
In the lawsuit, EFF alleges that AT&T, in addition to allowing the NSA direct access to the phone and Internet communications passing over its network, has given the government unfettered access to its over 300 terabyte "Daytona" database of caller information—one of the largest databases in the world.Whole complaint.pdf
More
Note: I never worked for THAT company. (whew!) It bought its name from a dying IXC (which I did once work for).
Comments:
Thanks, David, it was a riddle and you've answered it.
RIDDLE: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court has approved 18,742 requests for search warrants and rejected 4. And, you can start a search in hot pursuit and get permission retroactively up to 72 hrs later. Why is a secret court hidden from public view and biased in the government's favor not good enough for the Bush administration?
ANSWER: Getting warrants from FISA is impossible because the government is running algorithms that expand the spy net electronically to hundreds of people in a few minutes.
When an interesting call is found using NSA's voice recognition computers, all inbound and outbound contacts to that person are automatically logged and that person's social network is charted. Repeat this a thousand times and you have a million warrants. The 21st Century Police State is based on technology that is too fast and powerful for court-reviewed warrants.
The phone companies' switches open the phone taps under government command. Government ability to demultiplex switch traffic in order to drop out particular calls has always been required, and one heard the big telcos complain about the added cost to their switches from time to time over the past decade. I presume there are now direct connections to NSA and thousands of ever-changing taps every hour.
The government asks, Who are this guy's friends? Some phone companies make calling records available so that the social network of any target is opened at once without waiting for the target person's phone to ring or dial out. The calling records into which AT&T/SBC gives the government data dips are said to be terabytes in size.
(Aside: perhaps like me you have noticed over the past 20 years that most supercomputing projects build two machines, and NSA gets one. It's a gov't subsidy, sort of like venture capital.)
I do not know what the e-mail path into NSA is. Perhaps someone can help out here.
Obviously it is within NSA's technical grasp to scan most e-mails in the country because their supercomputing power is not measured in the teraflop speed of their fastest machine, it is measured in football fields. But I don't see how the traffic could divert into NSA and out again. Therefore I imagine the government is pressuring the telecommunications industry to install routers with wire-speed mail filtering throughout the national communications infrastructure. The hits (packets) filtered out of the total national traffic could then be easily forwarded to NSA.
CONFIRMATION: The State of the Union speech painted the program as listening in to one phone call. Read between the lines. The President has said oversight is fine, but no one must ever find out or reveal the program, lest he aid the enemies of our country. Think about it.
CONCLUSION: After the Gulf Stream stops, restoring the Earth to the temperatures it has today will not restart it because of the hysteresis of large systems. Also, after people realize that the American experiment in democracy has ended, restoring it will be impossible because the needed institutions are neutralized and potential supporters are frightened and ask you to go away.
The march towards the point of no return is not violent; people give away their freedoms voluntarily, and every step is cloaked in legality. I won't worry, I'll enjoy myself. No harm will befall me because I've chosen the winning side -- it's so obvious which side to join! -- as so many have before me, in Japan, in Italy, in Germany, in France.
RIDDLE: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court has approved 18,742 requests for search warrants and rejected 4. And, you can start a search in hot pursuit and get permission retroactively up to 72 hrs later. Why is a secret court hidden from public view and biased in the government's favor not good enough for the Bush administration?
ANSWER: Getting warrants from FISA is impossible because the government is running algorithms that expand the spy net electronically to hundreds of people in a few minutes.
When an interesting call is found using NSA's voice recognition computers, all inbound and outbound contacts to that person are automatically logged and that person's social network is charted. Repeat this a thousand times and you have a million warrants. The 21st Century Police State is based on technology that is too fast and powerful for court-reviewed warrants.
The phone companies' switches open the phone taps under government command. Government ability to demultiplex switch traffic in order to drop out particular calls has always been required, and one heard the big telcos complain about the added cost to their switches from time to time over the past decade. I presume there are now direct connections to NSA and thousands of ever-changing taps every hour.
The government asks, Who are this guy's friends? Some phone companies make calling records available so that the social network of any target is opened at once without waiting for the target person's phone to ring or dial out. The calling records into which AT&T/SBC gives the government data dips are said to be terabytes in size.
(Aside: perhaps like me you have noticed over the past 20 years that most supercomputing projects build two machines, and NSA gets one. It's a gov't subsidy, sort of like venture capital.)
I do not know what the e-mail path into NSA is. Perhaps someone can help out here.
Obviously it is within NSA's technical grasp to scan most e-mails in the country because their supercomputing power is not measured in the teraflop speed of their fastest machine, it is measured in football fields. But I don't see how the traffic could divert into NSA and out again. Therefore I imagine the government is pressuring the telecommunications industry to install routers with wire-speed mail filtering throughout the national communications infrastructure. The hits (packets) filtered out of the total national traffic could then be easily forwarded to NSA.
CONFIRMATION: The State of the Union speech painted the program as listening in to one phone call. Read between the lines. The President has said oversight is fine, but no one must ever find out or reveal the program, lest he aid the enemies of our country. Think about it.
CONCLUSION: After the Gulf Stream stops, restoring the Earth to the temperatures it has today will not restart it because of the hysteresis of large systems. Also, after people realize that the American experiment in democracy has ended, restoring it will be impossible because the needed institutions are neutralized and potential supporters are frightened and ask you to go away.
The march towards the point of no return is not violent; people give away their freedoms voluntarily, and every step is cloaked in legality. I won't worry, I'll enjoy myself. No harm will befall me because I've chosen the winning side -- it's so obvious which side to join! -- as so many have before me, in Japan, in Italy, in Germany, in France.
(Apologies if this is redundant)
arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051220-5808.html
Reviews past surveillance programs, shows the roots of the present one.
--with thanks to Joel.
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arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051220-5808.html
Reviews past surveillance programs, shows the roots of the present one.
--with thanks to Joel.
