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The Wiretap Rooms: The NSA's Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities
The secrets are hidden behind fortified walls in cities across the United States, inside towering, windowless skyscrapers and fortress-like concrete structures that were built to withstand earthquakes and even nuclear attack. Thousands of people pass by the buildings each day and rarely give them a second glance, because their function is not publicly known. They are an integral part of one of the world's largest telecommunications networks – and they are also linked to a controversial National Security Agency surveillance program.
Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. In each of these cities, The Intercept has identified an AT&T facility containing networking equipment that transports large quantities of internet traffic across the United States and the world. A body of evidence – including classified NSA documents, public records, and interviews with several former AT&T employees – indicates that the buildings are central to an NSA spying initiative that has for years monitored billions of emails, phone calls, and online chats passing across U.S. territory.
The NSA considers AT&T to be one of its most trusted partners and has lauded the company's "extreme willingness to help." It is a collaboration that dates back decades.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DannyB on Tuesday June 26 2018, @03:49PM (3 children)
Let me turn that around. Maybe AT&T is evil, and saw the opportunity to be even more evil when the NSA came knocking. After all, scooping up everything for the NSA would mean that such data would pass through AT&T's hands. Of course, it did already, which is why the NSA would come knocking. But maybe AT&T, being evil that it is, could get some secret protections or "look the other way" while AT&T makes some observations of its own from all that data.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by khallow on Tuesday June 26 2018, @04:06PM (2 children)
Ok...
Or maybe AT&T is the evil deity responsible for all evil done in the cosmos, who has clouded our perceptions so that it merely appears to be a large, profit-grubbing corporation!
Sure, AT&T could be even more evil than we expect. But the present story is pretty straightforward. AT&T compromises the communications of its customers for NSA money and legal protection. If there's more to the story than that, then maybe it'll come out. But to speculate, apparently merely for the technical sake of stretching out a very strained narrative of evil corporations, of some deeper involvement for AT&T doesn't seem worthwhile to me.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday June 26 2018, @05:44PM (1 child)
This is a rehashing of the well known proverb that "power corrupts". Whether it's government or corporate, or both together, it bears close watching and restraint.
> stretching out a very strained narrative of evil corporations
If anything, our naivety goes in the other direction. We're too despairing of our own power to check the powerful, feel too helpless or busy to fight back effectively. Examples abound of their abuse of the power and trust they have. The 2008 market crash provoked the voters into sweeping the Republicans out, but what did the Democrats do about it? Very little. Squandered their opportunity to clean things up, with enough of them succumbing to corruption that Hillary's evident policy of more of the same didn't resonate. I can understand the voters feeling helpless when given an establishment machine Democrat for a candidate, wanting to throw a wrench into the system.
Tricky Dick was the first president since the first Gilded Age who broke that trust with his disregard of the law and the limits of presidential power, and his dark nature that saw Democrats as enemies who didn't deserve fair and equitable treatment that culminated in the whole infamous Watergate scandal. Not even Harding messed up in that fashion. Harding was a bad president who was nevertheless a sincere and nice guy, honestly trying to do his best for the nation. His problem was that he was too nice to the corrupt rich and powerful, didn't rein in their money grabs and reckless and negligent disregard of the commons. Since Nixon, we've had no less than 2 truly terrible presidents, Cheney and Trump, who haven't the wisdom to understand how their execrable behavior soils and degrades everything. They don't much give a damn either. To take such a soulless, mercenary view of friendship and trust as something to spend, same as money! The US is losing friends all over the world, and all these clowns can say about that is that we don't need them anyway, they're useless and weak.
There are so many blatantly corrupt things going on right under our noses. We all know telecoms companies are monopolistic, price gouging scum. And that they spy on us. Health care is another area riddled with massive dishonesty, from the pill pushers of Big Pharma to the deliberately byzantine and way overpriced billing practiced by hospitals. The justifications for charging 150 times the value of an item, so that a $2 bag of salt water generates a $300 bill, are ridiculous. The biggest and ultimately most damaging con of all is that perpetrated by Big Oil, should sea levels rise hugely and force billions of people to at the very least abandon trillions in infrastructure and relocate to higher ground.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 26 2018, @10:21PM
Bullshit. I agree there's a con, but it's not perpetrated by Big Oil who has spent and exerted remarkably little on their supposed con. Let us note that the "rise hugely" of sea level is projected to happen over centuries. That means that not only will those trillions of USD in infrastructure be abandoned, they'll be abandoned multiple times just due to the aging of the infrastructure. Guess what will happen during one of those times? The parties threatened by rising sea levels will buy property that's further uphill or they'll add some dirt to the current space. Either way, we'll easily keep up with rising sea levels. That's why I've said all along that we won't even notice rising sea levels.
Moving on,
The thing is, the NSA is the organization with the power. It wouldn't happen without them. They write the checks. They make the plans. They protect the various guilty parties.
I'd say gullibility is the worse threat, as demonstrated by your rant about sea level rise. Someone spins a pretty fairy tale about Big Oil making the seas rise, and you're all over it.
That's what happens when you have a huge system that no one can monitor. Corrupt shit happens. My suggestion is to greatly reduce the scope of the problem. That's why I'm a government minimalist.