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Privacy World - The WORLD'S SHREWDEST PRIVACY NEWSLETTER
Is the NSA spying on U.S. Internet traffic? Two former AT&T employees say the telecom giant has maintained a secret,
highly secure room in St. Louis since 2002. Intelligence experts
say it bears the earmarks of a National Security Agency operation.
In a pivotal network operations center in metropolitan St. Louis,
AT&T has maintained a secret, highly secured room since 2002 where
government work is being conducted, according to two former AT&T
workers once employed at the center.
In interviews with Salon, the former AT&T workers said that only
government officials or AT&T employees with top-secret security
clearance are admitted to the room, located inside AT&T's facility
in Bridgeton. The room's tight security includes a biometric
"mantrap" or highly sophisticated double door, secured with retinal
and fingerprint scanners. The former workers say company
supervisors told them that employees working inside the room were
"monitoring network traffic" and that the room was being used by "a
government agency."
The details provided by the two former workers about the Bridgeton
room bear the distinctive earmarks of an operation run by the
National Security Agency, according to two intelligence experts with
extensive knowledge of the NSA and its operations. In addition to
the room's high-tech security, those intelligence experts told
Salon, the exhaustive vetting process AT&T workers were put through
before being granted top-secret security clearance points to the
NSA, an agency known as much for its intense secrecy as its
technological sophistication.
"It was very hush-hush," said one of the former AT&T workers. "We
were told there was going to be some government personnel working in
that room. We were told, 'Do not try to speak to them. Do not
hamper their work. Do not impede anything that they're doing.'"
The importance of the Bridgeton facility is its role in managing the
"common backbone" for all of AT&T's Internet operations. According
to one of the former workers, Bridgeton serves as the technical
command center from which the company manages all the routers and
circuits carrying the company's domestic and international Internet
traffic. Therefore, Bridgeton could be instrumental for conducting
surveillance or collecting data.
If the NSA is using the secret room, it would appear to bolster
recent allegations that the agency has been conducting broad and
possibly illegal domestic surveillance and data collection
operations authorized by the Bush administration after the terrorist
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. AT&T's Bridgeton location would give
the NSA potential access to an enormous amount of Internet data --
currently, the telecom giant controls approximately one-third of all
bandwidth carrying Internet traffic to homes and businesses across
the United States.
The nature of the government operation using the Bridgeton room
remains unknown, and could be legal. Aside from surveillance or
data collection, the room could conceivably house a federal law
enforcement operation, a classified research project, or some other
unknown government operation.
The former workers, both of whom were approached by and spoke
separately to Salon, asked to remain anonymous because they still
work in the telecommunications industry. They both left the company
in good standing. Neither worked inside the secured room or has
access to classified information. One worked in AT&T's broadband
division until 2003. The other asked to be identified only as a
network technician, and worked at Bridgeton for about three years.
The disclosure of the room in Bridgeton follows assertions made
earlier this year by a former AT&T worker in California, Mark Klein,
who revealed that the company had installed a secret room in a San
Francisco facility and reconfigured its circuits, allegedly to help
collect data for use by the government. In detailed documents he
provided to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Klein also alleged
there were other secret rooms at AT&T facilities in other U.S.
cities.
NSA expert Matthew Aid, who has spent the last decade researching a
forthcoming three-volume history of the agency, said of the
Bridgeton room: "I'm not a betting man, but if I had to plunk $100
down, I'd say it's safe that it's NSA." Aid told Salon he believes
the secret room is likely part of "what is obviously a much larger
operation, or series of interrelated operations" combining foreign
intelligence gathering with domestic eavesdropping and data
collection.
"You're talking about a backbone for computer communications, and
that's NSA," Russ Tice, a former high-level NSA intelligence
officer, told Salon. Tice, a 20-year veteran of multiple U.S.
intelligence agencies, worked for the NSA until spring 2005.
"Whatever is happening there with the security you're talking about
is a whole lot more closely held than what's going on with the Klein
case" in San Francisco, he said. (The San Francisco room is secured
only by a special combination lock, according to the Klein
documents.)
Tice added that for an operation requiring access to routers and
gateways, "the obvious place to do it is right at the source."
In a statement provided to Salon, NSA spokesman Don Weber said:
"Given the nature of the work we do, it would be irresponsible to
comment on actual or alleged operational issues as it would give
those wishing to do harm to the United States insight that could
potentially place Americans in danger; therefore, we have no
information to provide. However, it is important to note that NSA
takes its legal responsibilities seriously and operates within the
law."
Since last December, news reports have asserted that the NSA has
conducted warrantless spying on the phone and e-mail communications
of thousands of people inside the U.S., and has been secretly
collecting the phone call records of millions of Americans, using
data provided by major telecommunications companies, including AT&T.
Such operations would represent a fundamental shift in the NSA's
secretive mission, which over the last three decades is widely
understood to have focused exclusively on collecting signals
intelligence from abroad.
The reported operations have sparked fierce protest by lawmakers and
civil liberties advocates, and have raised fundamental questions
about the legality of Bush administration policies, including their
consequences for the privacy rights of Americans. The Bush
administration has acknowledged the use of domestic surveillance
operations since Sept. 11, 2001, but maintains they are conducted
within the legal authority of the presidency. Several cases
challenging the legality of the alleged spying operations are now
pending in federal court, including suits against the federal
government, and AT&T, among other telecom companies.
In a statement provided to Salon, AT&T spokesman Walt Sharp said:
"If and when AT&T is asked by government agencies for help, we do so
strictly within the law and under the most stringent conditions.
Beyond that, we can't comment on matters of national security."
According to the two former AT&T workers and the Klein documents,
the room in the pivotal Bridgeton facility was set up several months
before the room in San Francisco. According to the Klein documents,
the work order for the San Francisco room came from Bridgeton,
suggesting that Bridgeton has a more integral role in operations
using the secured rooms.
The company's Bridgeton network operations center, where
approximately 100 people work, is located inside a one-story brick
building with a small two-story addition connected to it. The
building shares a parking lot with a commercial business and is near
an interstate highway.
According to the two former workers, the secret room is an internal
structure measuring roughly 20 feet by 40 feet, and was previously
used by employees of the company's WorldNet division. In spring
2002, they said, the company moved WorldNet employees to a different
part of the building and sealed up the room, plastering over the
window openings and installing steel double doors with no handles
for moving equipment in and out of the room. The company then
installed the high-tech mantrap, which has opaque Plexiglas-like
doors that prevent anyone outside the room from seeing clearly into
the mantrap chamber, or the room beyond it. Both former workers say
the mantrap drew attention from employees for being so high-tech.
Telecom companies commonly use mantraps to secure data storage
facilities, but they are typically less sophisticated, requiring
only a swipe card to pass through. The high-tech mantrap in
Bridgeton seems unusual because it is located in an otherwise
low-key, small office building. Tice said it indicates "something
going on that's very important, because you're talking about an
awful lot of money" to pay for such security measures.
The vetting process for AT&T workers granted access to the room also
points to the NSA, according to Tice and Aid.
The former network technician said he knows at least three AT&T
employees who have been working in the room since 2002. "It took
them six months to get the top-security clearance for the guys," the
network technician said. "Although they work for AT&T, they're
actually doing a job for the government." He said that each of them
underwent extensive background checks before starting their jobs in
the room. The vetting process included multiple polygraph tests,
employment history reviews, and interviews with neighbors and school
instructors, going as far back as elementary school.
Aid said that type of vetting is precisely the kind NSA personnel
who receive top-secret SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information)
clearance go through. "Everybody who works at NSA has an SCI
clearance," said Aid.
It's possible the Bridgeton room is being used for a federal law
enforcement operation. According to the Communications Assistance
for Law Enforcement Act of 1994, telecom companies are required to
assist law enforcement officials who have legal authorization to
conduct electronic surveillance, either in pursuit of criminal
suspects or for the protection of national security. The companies
must design or modify their systems to make such surveillance
possible, essentially by making them wiretap-ready.
The FBI is the primary federal agency that tracks and apprehends
terrorist suspects within the U.S. Yet, there are several
indications that the Bridgeton room does not involve the FBI.
"The FBI, which is probably the least technical agency in the U.S.
government, doesn't use mantraps," Aid said. "But virtually every
area of the NSA's buildings that contain sensitive operations
require you to go through a mantrap with retinal and fingerprint
scanners. All of the sensitive offices in NSA buildings have them."
The description of the opaque Plexiglas-like doors in Bridgeton, Aid
said, indicates that the doors are likely infused with Kevlar for
bulletproofing -- another signature measure that he said is used to
secure NSA facilities: "You could be inside and you can't kick your
way out. You can't shoot your way out. Even if you put plastique
explosives, all you could do is blow a very small hole in that
opaque glass."
Jameel Jaffer, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties
Union's national security program, said it is unlikely that the FBI
would set up an ongoing technical operation -- in this case, for
several years running -- inside a room of a telecommunications
company. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, passed by
Congress in 1978, requires law enforcement officials to obtain
warrants from a secret federal court for domestic surveillance
operations involving the protection of national security. If the
FBI (or another federal agency) wanted data, it would more likely be
targeting a specific individual or set of individuals suspected of
engaging in criminal or terrorist activities. The agency would
obtain a warrant and then call AT&T, or show up in person with the
warrant and ask for the wiretap to be engaged. According to Jaffer,
the FBI, NSA or any other federal agency could also legally tap into
communications data under federal guidelines using technical means
that would not require technical assistance of a telecom company.
In an e-mail statement to Salon, FBI spokesperson Paul Bresson said:
"The FBI does not confirm whether or not we are involved in an
alleged ongoing operational activity. In all cases, FBI operations
are conducted in strict accordance with established Department of
Justice guidelines, FBI policy, and the law."
Rather than specifically targeted surveillance, it is also possible
that the Bridgeton room is being used for a classified government
project, such as data mining, with which the Pentagon has
experimented in the past. Data mining uses automated methods to
search through large volumes of data, looking for patterns that
might help identify terrorist suspects, for example. According to
Tice, private sector employees who work on classified government
projects for the NSA are required to undergo the same kind of
top-secret security clearance that AT&T workers in the Bridgeton
room underwent.
According to the former network technician, all three AT&T employees
he knows who work inside the room have network technician and
administration backgrounds -- not research backgrounds -- suggesting
that those workers are only conducting maintenance or technical
operations inside the room.
Furthermore, Tice said it is much more likely that any classified
project using data collected via a corporate facility would take
place in separate facilities: "The information that you garner from
something like a room siphoning information and filtering it would
be sent to some place where you'd have people thinking about what to
do with that data," he said.
Dave Farber, a respected computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon
University and former chief technologist for the Federal
Communications Commission, also said it is likely that data
collected in a facility like the Bridgeton center would be used
elsewhere, once the facility is set up to divert the data. "If I
own the routers, I can put code in there to have them monitor for
certain data. That's not a particularly difficult job," said
Farber, who is considered one of the pioneers of Internet
architecture. Farber said that "packets" of data can essentially be
copied and then sent to some other location for use. "Most of the
problems would have to do with keeping your staff from knowing too
much about it."
According to the former network technician, workers at Bridgeton, at
the direction of government officials, could conceivably collect
data using any AT&T router around the country, which he says number
between 1,500 and 2,000. To do so, the company would need to
install a wiretap-like device at select locations for "sniffing" the
desired data. That could explain the purpose of the San Francisco
room divulged by Klein, as well as the secret rooms he alleged
existed at AT&T facilities in other U.S. cities.
"The network sniffer with the right software can capture anything,"
the former network technician said. "You can get people's e-mail,
VoIP phone calls,
-- even passwords
and credit card transactions -- as long as you have the right
software to decrypt that."
In theory, surveillance involving Internet communications can be
executed legally under federal law. "But with most of these
things," Farber said, "the problem is that it just takes one small
step to make it illegal."
Thanks to Kim Zetter for the above article.
Until next issue stay cool and remain low profile!
Privacy World
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