LBN from yesterday

GD from yesterday

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...

In 2003, Room 641A of a large telecommunications building in downtown San Francisco was filled with powerful data-mining equipment for a "special job" by the National Security Agency, according to a former AT&T technician. It was fed by fiber-optic cables that siphoned copies of e-mails and other online traffic from one of the largest Internet hubs in the United States, the former employee says in court filings.

Neither AT&T nor the federal government has admitted even the existence of a secret room, and the Justice Department is arguing that the cases should be dismissed because their subject matter is a state secret. The communications company, meanwhile, says it is prevented from properly defending itself because of national security reasons and dismisses the employee who briefly saw the room and worked on supporting equipment as a "line technician who . . . never had access to the 'secret room' he purports to describe." <--- that is as scarey an excuse as it is laughable

The allegations by Mark Klein, who worked for AT&T's WorldNet Service, underscore the government's dependence on major telecommunications providers to physically tap optic fibers that carry electronic signals around the globe. Some of the evidence also suggests that the NSA efforts were not limited to overseas e-mail communications and included the collection of purely domestic traffic.

"I conclude that AT&T has constructed an extensive -- and expensive -- collection of infrastructure that collectively has all the capability necessary to conduct large-scale covert gathering of -based communications information, not only for communications to overseas locations, but for purely domestic communications as well," said Marcus, a veteran computer network executive who worked at GTE, Genuity and other companies before joining the FCC.

James X. Dempsey, policy director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said the evidence gleaned from the AT&T case appears to confirm that "there is a massive surveillance capability built into the network" by the federal government. But, Dempsey added, "the mere fact that the capability has been built and utilized still does not answer the fundamental question -- has it been exercised under constitutional parameters? That, in a way, is what these cases are trying to get to."