AT&T Is Accused of Role in Eavesdropping

[gt3944]

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 31 — The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties organization, filed a class-action suit against AT&T on Tuesday in federal court here, saying the company was violating the law and customers' privacy in cooperating with the National Security Agency on computerized surveillance.

The program has been in the news for more than a month after news reports that President Bush authorized the N.S.A. to intercept international telephone and Internet communications of people in the United States without court authorization. A spokeswoman for AT&T said it would not comment on questions involving national security or privacy.

In its suit, the foundation says the company has allowed the agency direct access to phone calls and Internet data moving over its network, as well as access to a vast database of call records.

"AT&T is breaking the law and invading the privacy of its customers," said Kevin Bankston, a staff lawyer for the foundation here.

Mr. Bankston said the group was not at liberty to say how it knew that the company and the spy agency were cooperating, but said it was confident that there was an illegal relationship.

AT&T has described its development of a vast data warehouse, including the Daytona system and databases like Hawkeye and Scamp, as a tool for market research and fraud detection. The company has stated that information from the databases is made available for warranted law enforcement inquiries.

I'm switching phone companies...

 

[XD_fan]

Its not just AT&T.

Look up CALEA. I can tell you for a fact the phone companies have little or no idea who is being snooped on or when. Pretty much every switching center in the country has a rack of *insert agency acronym* equipment installed that has one purpose and one purpose alone. To eavesdrop on calls. What you think, they still go out and climb poles to do this stuff? They just do it from a computer now.

 

[Northwet]

CALEA is also wireless

This from me self, an ex-AT&T Wireless Manager.
North"wet"

 

[TexasRifleman]

I'm switching phone companies...

Good luck with that. Reference the above mentioned CALEA.

Even the VoIP guys like Vonage are required to have CALEA equipment and there is little auditing trail of who uses it and for what purpose.

 

[dolanp]

Things are coming to light which I have no doubt have been going on everywhere for many years. There is no escape from Big Brother's eyes and ears.

 

[pete f]

Why do you think bell labs was the place to be for so many years.

During WWII there was a underground or back chanel system of using european phones based on some extra dial pattern developed by some Dutch guy. Monitoring the traffic is simple. back doors exist in every system for both "authorised" and "unauthorised". The hardest part is discerning what conversations are relevant. Which phone conversation wit the words "I'm gonna kill him" is to be listened to by a human ear and evaluated. does your screaming "kill that dumbass" refer to an authentic threat against Sen Charles Shumer, of is it you telling the TV image that you are displeased with the umps call.


Why are you suprised. this has been going on since the 50's


This is not Tin foil hat time. EVERY cell phone conversation is captured. and it would be my guess every single land line is too.































'

 

[TexasRifleman]

This is not Tin foil hat time. EVERY cell phone conversation is captured. and it would be my guess every single land line is too.

Not IS captured, but CAN BE very easily. The CALEA system is a very frightening tool with few checks and balances.

The FCC has publicly announced all this stuff in their Notices of Proposed Rule Making but no one notices and these rules slip by again and again.

 

[WillBrayJr]

Thats it I'm changing phone companies too. Their not going to hear anything illegal from me, it's just the idea of the fact.

 

[TexasRifleman]

Thats it I'm changing phone companies too. Their not going to hear anything illegal from me, it's just the idea of the fact.

Again, cancel your phone services completely then.


ALL phone companies are required by the FCC to provide these "lawful intercept" capabilities into their networks.

 

[ArmedBear]

Yeah, not every conversation is captured. Give a moment of thought to both the magnetic storage space required to do this and the human labor required to sift through the data even if it has been pre-filtered by computer voice recognition software, and you'll realize that the cost would be prohibitive. And voice recognition doesn't do that well with thick Arabic accents, or North Koreans speaking broken English with Pakistani black market arms dealers.

However, look around you at the antennas everywhere. Little ones on your cell phone and laptop, big ones on towers and buildings. That cross on the steeple in the farm town where there's no hill for miles? Chances are it's actually a cell-phone antenna that helps the church pay its bills and devote more money to charity work. That palm tree in California or Florida? It might be a cell tower. Seriously. I know lots of people in the cell business, and church crosses and palm trees make good cell towers without pissing off the old biddies at the local Historic Preservation and Beautification Committee.

Your telecom is in the airwaves. It's not really private. If you expect it to be, and aren't into encryption, you are clueless.

The real bummer here is that Al Qaeda now knows we can hear what they say on the phone. They used to be stupid enough to assume we couldn't. Now they'll just use 128-bit encryption, available cheaply and readily, and we've lost an important anti-terror tool

 

[Soybomb]

The most troubling part to me is the inclusion of Internet data. People always suggest rumors of internet snooping by big brother. Now as a guy that runs a small isp I can say we do sometimes get subpoenas but everything appears on the up and up. However smaller isp's get their service from 9-10 larger isps called tier 1 isps. ATT is one of these few provides. Obviously if you wanted to do some massive snooping you'd have to deal with far fewer people if you implemented it at one of the major carriers than the smaller guys like myself.

Its troubling to think that my backbone provider (actually not ATT but...) could be giving someone free access to my data stream without authorization. I wish I saw more of an internet trend to move toward encryption.

 

[ReadyontheRight]

Were they eavesdropping for the BATF?

http://www.armedpolitesociety.com/

 

[rick_reno]

Guess what - if you search CALEA http://www.askcalea.net/calea.html for the term "warrant" - it doesn't exist.

 

[XD_fan]

Guess what - if you search CALEA http://www.askcalea.net/calea.html for the term "warrant" - it doesn't exist.

That is correct. The DOJ/FBI/etc. has direct access to the calea equipment. It is required for all telecomm providers to install it and give access and control to the government. The only way to avoid CALEA is to never use ANY telecomm service. That means, no internet, no cell phone, no blackberry, no landline, nothing, nada.

 

[TexasRifleman]

That is correct. The DOJ/FBI/etc. has direct access to the calea equipment. It is required for all telecomm providers to install it and give access and control to the government. The only way to avoid CALEA is to never use ANY telecomm service. That means, no internet, no cell phone, no blackberry, no landline, nothing, nada.

Oh, and before it starts..... CALEA was introduced while Bill Clinton was President, so don't even think about it. You know who you are.....

 

[pete f]

Every phone conversation is captured. it is run thru a filter that just looks for certain words and phrases that then trigger examination. EVERY phone call goes thru this. If you string together enough words of interest, then these filters catch that pattern and pull the whole conversation out of the mix. Not all phone conversations are saved past the length of the call, but there are also other patterns that are recorded. Phones that only call one or two numbers. phones that show simultaneously, ie cloned phones. Phones that are Prepaid and not used for a long time then used briefly for a long time. Most of the parameters are of course secret, but Nova the TV show had an episode about domestic and foreign spying some time ago and it was pretty clear about how all calls at least got the basic filters. If you say bomb, president, airforce one, etc on one call, that call went from one track to a second track automatically. if you cross any of the other parameters, then more intense scrutiny was placed on the call. This all takes place in real time or no more than seconds after you make the call. The place that was the most interesting was a aerial view of Ft Mead, and it laid out that the area denoted to super computer space for elint purposes approached 30 acres, and that was what you could seen. not underground.

this does not mean that every call gets held on a tivo disc somewhere. but it does mean that the call did run thru a filter.

 

[beerslurpy]

Dude CALEA is old news and it isnt just AT&T. I remember reading quite a while ago about security holes introduced by accident when implementing CALEA compliance. The entire communications system is built to be eavesdroppable.

I really really really wish that someone would get off their ass and make an encrypted end-to-end cellular system. The problem is the expense of making such a system and the fact that the government has to exert so little effort to threaten your investment to get compliance.

I feel sorry for the chinese. American companies did the satellite work for their entire phone system. And I would bet that our voice recognition system is just as good for chinese as it is for english.

 

[Optical Serenity]

Oh, and before it starts..... CALEA was introduced while Bill Clinton was President, so don't even think about it. You know who you are.....

+1 So many times I hear people refer to Bush as the one responsible for CALEA, Echelon, and the likes...

 

[PCGS65]

Things are coming to light which I have no doubt have been going on everywhere for many years. There is no escape from Big Brother's eyes and ears.

+1

by pete f, Why are you suprised. this has been going on since the 50's

Yep! What suprises me is how few people know about it. Then guess what, there's nothing you/we can do about it.
Here's a good exanple of how our 1st&4A rights are slowly erroded so we don't notice until it's too late. Many banks require a thumb print on checks when cashing in the name of security. And yes they have your picture from the cameras to match to the fingerprint. I was at a major grocery store on 2-2-06 and the cashier told me by next week I can scan my fingerprint to pay for groceries directly from my bank account!! And how it will save me money by not having to use my debit card!! What a load of BS!!! I've always paid cash and never have had a debit card and never will. I told the cashier when they stop accepting cash for groceries I will gladly STARVE TO DEATH!!! There's more but I'm a little wound up about this, so that's enough for now. And NO it's not Bushs fault!!

 

[PCGS65]

+1 So many times I hear people refer to Bush as the one responsible for CALEA, Echelon, and the likes...

+1 Also anything negative/bad. Even if it happened on a different planet! You know, go figure.

 

[Robert Hairless]

Help me understand the popular support for governmental placement of observation cameras "to deter crime" and the popular condemnation of communications monitoring (telephone and Internet) for the same purpose?

Please don't get into legal theories about expectation of privacy. My question, and my interest, is in people's attitudes. Why do people seem to want observation cameras while they raise an outcry against other forms of monitoring?