AT&T, like the other big telcos, has been backing and filling desperately over the last week or so, since the revelation of the NSA's secret phone monitoring program hit the news services. Playing the cover-your-ass game, they've denied any participation in the program, and repeatedly assured their customers that no records of theirs have been divulged at all.
Sadly, their situation just got about a thousand times worse, and I'm gonna tell you why. THEN you can get pissed off. Trust me on this - you're not as angry about this now as you will be in a few minutes.
Wired News, this morning, posted over 30 pages of documents from the lawsuit over AT&T's alleged participation in the NSA program on the internet.
They did this because:
AT&T claims information in the file is proprietary and that it would suffer severe harm if it were released. Based on what we've seen, Wired News disagrees. In addition, we believe the public's right to know the full facts in this case outweighs AT&T's claims to secrecy.That sounds about right. Well, what's in these mysterious documents? (Warning: annoying, slow .pdf file!) Well, despite the judge issuing a gag order against the EFF forbidding them to publish the documents themselves, and AT&T's desperate efforts to hide them:
The court's gag order is very specific in barring only the EFF, its representatives and its technical experts from discussing and disseminating this information. The court explicitly rejected AT&T's motion to include Klein in the gag order and declined AT&T's request to force the EFF to return the documents.Which means it's ok if I tell you that these documents reveal that not only did AT&T give away phone records, they went a good bit further. Like, for example:
In 2003 AT&T built "secret rooms" hidden deep in the bowels of its central offices in various cities, housing computer gear for a government spy operation which taps into the company's popular WorldNet service and the entire internet. These installations enable the government to look at every individual message on the internet and analyze exactly what people are doing. Documents showing the hardwire installation in San Francisco suggest that there are similar locations being installed in numerous other cities.Which means that they're not only listening to your phone calls, they're reading your emails, tracking which websites you visit, reading your instant messages, seeing which auctions you go to on eBay; THEY ARE WATCHING EVERYTHING YOU DO ON THE INTERNET. Think I'm kidding? I NEVER KID.
"Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record," says Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of Narus, a Mountain View, California, company. "We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls."I'm not sure what kind of friggin' fan dance this administration has to do to convince people that they're trying to turn the USA into a police state, but THAT'S WHAT THIS IS. This is the old Soviet "internal security," the Nazi Schutzstaffel, the WWII Italian Carabinieri; this is what it looks like when the totalitarians begin their open march against your freedom.
Both Republicans and Democrats voted for the USA-PATRIOT Act. Both groups voted to allow the expansion of police powers; and now both sides are playing "It wasn't me! It was the one-armed man!"
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, boot ALL of them out of office this next election, and replace them with Independents. Libertarians. Fuck it, the GREEN PARTY is better than these assholes. And they want to take away your car and make you live like the Amish.
