Big Brother on Folsom Street

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On May 21 the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave a presentation in San Francisco about its battle against the NSA’s domestic spying program, and AT&T’s role in it.

On May 21 Hugh D’Andrade of the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave a slide show presentation at Bound Together Books in San Francisco.

The title of his presentation was “Big Brother on Folsom Street: How AT&T Is Helping the NSA Spy on You.”

The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), started in 1990, exists to protect freedom in the electronic and digital worlds, to promote innovation in those spheres, and to defend Fair Use of copyrighted materials in cyberspace, D’Andrade stated.

The NSA (National Security Agency) began in 1951. This federal agency’s mission is to intercept and analyze foreign intelligence, specializing in satellite intercept of information. NSA possesses the world’s most powerful Supercomputer, according to D’Andrade.

In 2005 the New York Times broke the story of the Bush administration’s domestic mass warrantless wiretapping of the phone calls and electronic communications of millions of the country’s citizens.

Not long after, Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician who'd worked at the company for over 20 years, walked into EFF’s San Francisco office with a stack of documents. Klein had taken these documents to the LA Times and New York Times previously, but neither newspaper was interested in them.

Klein had “found evidence of a massive spy operation” going on at AT&T’s facility at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco “intercepting everyone’s phone calls, emails, and other Internet activities,” and routing them to the NSA,” D’Andrade said.

Klein revealed that the NSA had set up a “Secret Room” in the Folsom Street facility, wherein a fiber optic “splitter” enabled the NSA to make a copy of all Internet info coming in and out of the AT&T building, “billions of bits of data per second,” D’Andrade reported.

The EFF website (eff.org) states that AT&T sends 300 million phone calls per day.

NSA could then forward the copied data to NSA headquarters, and it consequently “goes on through to a secret government network we don’t know much about,” D’Andrade said.

This interception affects not only AT&T customers, but “other companies sending their stuff through AT&T, everyone’s data,” D’Andrade reported.

In addition, there are “15-20 similar sites, possibly more,” according to the EFF website, based on testimony by Mark Klein and J. Scott Marcus, “a former Senior Advisor for Internet Technology at the FCC."

So far the EFF has identified other similar AT&T/NSA sites in Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, St. Louis, San Jose, and Atlanta.

This NSA domestic spying program has been going on not only with the cooperation (and payment) of AT&T, but also Verizon, Bell South, MCI and Sprint.

Another telecom provider, Qwest, refused to participate. Qwest’s CEO has testified that the NSA’s contract offer to join the program preceded 911.

Mark Klein had another document exposing NSA’s use in the Secret Room of a NARUS 6400 device to carry out high speed analysis of all the data it intercepted, D’Andrade said.

NARUS, Klein testified, “is known to be used particularly by government intelligence agencies to sift through large amounts of data looking for preprogrammed targets.” Klein has also said, “Based on my understanding of the connections and equipment at issue, it appears the NSA is capable of conducting what amounts to the vacuum-cleaning surveillance of all the data crossing the internet, whether that be peoples emails, web surfing or any other data.”

The NSA is supposed to deal with foreign intelligence only. But this was a domestic dragnet, and furthermore the agency had no warrants to carry out these operations.

According to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the NSA has to obtain a warrant from secret FISA courts before it can begin to carry out a spy operation.

EFF’s D’Andrade reported that, between 1979 and 2006, there were almost 23,000 requests for such warrants, and only a handful were denied.

Due to the exposures of the NSA’s secret domestic spy program in 2005, thanks in great part to the efforts of Mark Klein and the EFF, the story went global.

The Bush administration at first denied the whole story, then by the end of 2005 admitted there had been warrantless wiretapping, but only on Al Queda.

In early 2006 the EFF filed a lawsuit in federal court, Hepting v. AT&T, with the intent of holding the telecom giant accountable for knowingly participating in the NSA’s illegal domestic spying program, D'Andrade reported.

The Bush administration responded by trying to have the suit thrown out, contending it “hurt national security to acknowledge the program,” D’Andrade said. The government also argued that the lawsuit would bankrupt AT&T and other participating telecoms.

But the San Francisco federal judge assigned to the case, Bush I appointee Vaughn Walker, rejected the government’s arguments, saying AT&T couldn’t have believed the NSA operations weren’t illegal.

Among the government and telecoms next moves were to have immunity declared for AT&T and the other participating companies. A battle raged for two years, with the immunity measure being withdraw in Congress repeatedly because the votes weren’t there to pass it.

But the measure finally passed in July last year. Hugh D’Andrade reported that “continuing blog coverage” of the issue to keep it in the public eye kept it from passing sooner.

In September ’08 the EFF filed another federal lawsuit, Jewel v. NSA, seeking to hold the agency responsible for illegal domestic spying on millions within the borders of the US.

But on April 3 of this year the Obama administration filed a motion to dismiss that suit, also being heard by Judge Vaughn.

In its motion the Justice Department “claims …that litigation over the wiretapping program would require the government to disclose privileged ‘state secrets’…essentially the same arguments made by the Bush administration three years ago,” according to the EFF website.

“President Obama promised the American people a new era of transparency, accountability, and respect for civil liberties,” said EFF Senior Attorney Kevin Bankston. “But with the Obama Justice Department continuing the Bush administration’s cover-up of the NSA’s dragnet surveillance of millions of Americans and insisting that the much publicized warrantless wiretapping program is still a ‘secret’ that the cannot be reviewed by the courts, it feels like déjà vu all over again.”

At the end of the May 21 program I asked Hugh D’Andrade if the massive domestic spy program was still going on at Folsom Street.

“As far as we know,” he replied, “it’s still going on.

For more info: http://www.eff.org/NSA

Original article posted at http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/05/22/18596999.php.