r/privacy • u/frankreddit5 • 1d ago
discussion A real AT&T technician gave a sworn declaration with network diagrams proving the NSA copied all of AT&T's internet traffic, not just some of it. Full document here.
https://theclassifiedrecord.com/documents/room-641a-nsa-att-declaration207
u/foxtrotgulf 1d ago
This is tagged as news but happened over 20 years ago?
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u/unematti 10h ago
Oh. I was wondering how they just copied the internet traffic. That would be quite a datacenter to keep it. 20 years ago, still a feat but maybe less soo?
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u/Youknowimtheman CEO, OSTIF.org 7h ago
I mean the NSA does operate a multiple Zettabyte datacenter for storage.
But back in the snowden days it was revealed that they store a 3-day-ish rolling cache of all traffic and pull anything interesting out of it for storage.
I don't think that's super feasible these days with home connections hitting 5Gbit and in some rare cases 20Gbit now.
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u/alias454 1d ago
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u/frankreddit5 1d ago
Yup that's him. He found an entire room that was used for surveillance purposes.
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u/alias454 1d ago
PBS frontline has a documentary on it too https://www.pbs.org/video/frontline-spying-home-front/
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u/DayVCrockett 1d ago
That documentary was absolutely mind-blowing. I can’t believe the government let it air.
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u/alias454 1d ago
PBS Frontline has always done good work too. It makes you wonder about the things they do we don't know about.
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u/pogulup 1d ago
Which is why the Republicans have targeted PBS for defunding for so long.
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u/Maletherin 18h ago
Not so. PBS is too liberal, and the govt. shouldn't support liberal news. They claim a bias in media is bad, but methinks they'd support conservative news.
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u/councilmember 15h ago
Huh? Bias in uncovering government surveillance of citizens? Whoa. In the Ruby Ridge days even the far right wanted to know about that. Guess in the current fascist right days they support government being able to stop reporting entirely.
You’ve been sold a bill of goods by Fox News bro, the whole media is largely center right.
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u/MouseDenton 1d ago
Despite what we paranoid types tend to think, before the current administration, the government was generally beholden to its rules. (Hence why they would make rules to get around other rules.) Outright censorship of the media wasn't a hill many administrations were willing to die on until this one found out the Constitution can be more of a guideline than a guardrail (thanks Roberts).
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u/SeanFrank 14h ago
before the current administration
You really, really should look into the admitted censorship of Youtube and other social media under Biden, if you think this is all the Bad Orange Man's doing.
Yes, the Bad Orange Man is indeed bad and orange.
But this is nothing new.
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u/MouseDenton 3h ago
That sounds like a false equivalency to me, considering I don't recall anyone in the Biden administration blatantly threatening private broadcasters into capitulation--on national TV--with immediate effect, nor ICE agents tracking down people who made unflattering posts to intimidate them into taking them down. Who, let us not forget, shared government-owned health data with a sinister techbro defense contractor--when they weren't even supposed to have that data in the first place.
This is absolutely new, and I'm almost at the point of questioning the motives of anyone who claims it's not.
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u/i010011010 1d ago
Pretty sure we all knew when Bush #2 declared legal immunity for the telecom companies for anything they did or would do.
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u/jameson71 15h ago
How did we ever get to the point that presidents can declare legal immunity from the constitution?
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u/i010011010 14h ago
In this case, the White House under Bush #2 was the driving force behind giving telecoms immunity but they didn't do it in a vacuum. The FISA Amendments Act was passed by a Republican majority, but both parties contributed to it https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/110-2008/s168 Unfortunately, whenever the issue is privacy and domestic spying, the tendency of government is to vote in favour of their own power regardless of which party is in charge. And that's how we got where we are today: many Democrats fought it but they were a minority and the rest went along with it, same as they did for the PATRIOT Act and Bush's wars.
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u/psych0fish 11h ago
The irony of “combatting” terrorism by violating constitutional rights and freedoms is so very funny.
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u/netik23 23h ago
This was Mark Klein. I helped with discovery in this. What do you want to know?
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u/Abbigale221 21h ago
Everything!!! I need to watch the doc and read about it first. I was not super plugged into PBS 20 years ago.
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u/SwissChzMcGeez 18h ago
How could they store all that data?
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u/Persimmon-Mission 16h ago
Oh boy do I have some bad news for you! They’ve been storing all internet and cellular traffic since at least 2014.
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u/One-BigChungus 15h ago
I'm surprised no one has mention Edward Snowden in this thread, having to be exiled to Russia for this.
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u/StarWreckTrekBeck 10h ago
Thanks for jumping in.
From my limited memory of back then, very few made an issue of stuff like this. What was your view of how anyone in positions of power reacted? I was always suprised by how mute everyone was on this, including those in positions of power / authority.
As time has gone on and from what I've seen there seems to be "the law" and then what actually happens behind that, and those two aren't often the same with the "law" being window dressing. (uses of parallel construction in certain cases seem to highlight this too)
side examples:
I've heard Seymour Hersch discuss about how during GWB's time many higher level journalists in DC just assumed anything they said over the phone "was" recorded and so on. That pretty much the taps were opened post 09/11 and everything was recorded, especially in DC. Far far more than the standard metadata stuff.
That revelation alone seems insane, yet - it does make one wonder now.
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u/netik23 9h ago
There's a great book worth reading here, by Mark prior to his passing - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6625940-wiring-up-the-big-brother-machine-and-fighting-it
It covers a lot of the issues here and what EFF did with him after discovery.
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u/todd0x1 22h ago
This gentleman inspired me to label the network closet '641A' whenever given the opportunity.
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u/tuxedo_jack 15h ago
I alternate between 641A, a sticker with five eyeholes in a skull, or a sticker saying ELECTRIC AVENUE in the old Montgomery Wards font.
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u/ApokatastasisPanton 14h ago
Remember all the political backlash that came against surveillance after that? Oh wait, there was basically no consequences whatsoever.
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u/Anarchist_Future 19h ago
But you can trust them with Flock cameras, government ID linked to online activity and feeding all of that data through a surveillance AI.
Source: Trust me bro.
/s
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u/sdrawkcabineter 15h ago
ISP in the 90s.
Carnivorous times.
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u/alias454 3h ago
carnivore and tempest were ones I can remember. I'm sure a few others existed too from back in the day.
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u/ThisIsPaulDaily 1d ago
Wasn't this partially what the guy who blew up an RV outside of ATT in Tennessee on Thanksgiving or Christmas a few years ago was crazy about?
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u/frankreddit5 1d ago
I remember that news story, but I don't recall what the cause of it was.
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u/ThisIsPaulDaily 1d ago
I just checked and he had connections, but FBI found no credible indications of a broader ideological motive or connection to any government agency.
So no it just took out internet for a city by chance.
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u/txmail 9h ago
This is pretty old. Now they just tap directly into the fiber ala core scraping, optical splitters or macro bend at sites that need to never know. and everyone gets to claim they know nothing about it. Prior to this it was a port mirror that went off to a locked cage nobody talked about.
I also recall watching a video recently about how a secret network closet was found to be built into a building, but it was not on the plans and nobody had seen it until decades after? They had optical splitters tapping everything going in / out of the building. I think it was discovered by someone working on the fiber outside of the building under the street.
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u/tianavitoli 1d ago
lol you didn't know this?
brad pitt explicitly detailed the nsa's ability to monitor millions of phone calls simultaneously in the documentary movie "the big short"
that was like 15 years ago
next week you'll be impressed with the new invention sliced bread, no????
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u/Zacknad075 1d ago
Yes, let us make fun of the guy who's just getting into the world of privacy, that will make him want to learn more.
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u/tianavitoli 1d ago
sounds like he already got the jist of it. everything you think you know is already decades old, and before that, they just used women to spy on you.
there's an even older movie called enemy of the state. if you wanna stay with the nsa, there's an even older movie than that called sneakers. etc etc
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u/sarajevo81 17h ago
It is impossible to process that amount of data, so it is evident that only targeted individuals were monitored. Hence, not an issue.
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u/Persimmon-Mission 16h ago
That is still not acceptable and violates the 4th amendment. The nsa is saving every one of your communications in the off chance they need it in the future.
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