Whistleblower Declaration and Other Key Documents Released to Public

More documents detailing secret government surveillance of AT&T’s Internet traffic have been released to the public as part of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF’s) class-action lawsuit against the telecom giant.

Some of the unsealed information was previously made public in redacted form. But after negotiations with AT&T, EFF has filed newly unredacted documents describing a secret, secure room in AT&T’s facilities that gave the National Security Agency (NSA) direct access to customers’ emails and other Internet communications. These include several internal AT&T documents that have long been available on media websites, EFF’s legal arguments to the 9th Circuit, and the full declarations of whistleblower Mark Klein and of J. Scott Marcus, the former Senior Advisor for Internet Technology to the Federal Communications Commission, who bolsters and explains EFF’s evidence.

“This is critical evidence supporting our claim that AT&T is cooperating with the NSA in the illegal dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans,” said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. “This surveillance is under debate in Congress and across the nation, as well as in the courts. The public has a right to see these important documents, the declarations from our witnesses, and our legal arguments, and we are very pleased to release them.”

[EFF]

“You’ve Already Seen Them”

There are no surprises in the AT&T documentation published Tuesday, which consist of a subset of the pages already published by Wired News. They include AT&T wiring diagrams, equipment lists and task orders that appear to show the company tapping into fiber-optic cables at the point where its backbone network connects to other ISPs at a San Francisco switching office. The documents appear to show the company siphoning off the traffic to a room packed with internet-monitoring gear.

Released along with the AT&T documents is a formerly sealed signed declaration from Klein, and a written analysis of the documents penned by internet expert J. Scott Marcus, which have been kept mostly under wraps by a court order that applied to the parties in the case.

The interpretation of Klein’s documents by Marcus, a former CTO for GTE and a former adviser to the FCC, are the most interesting documents released Tuesday.

“This configuration appears to have the capability to enable surveillance and analysis of internet content on a massive scale, including both overseas and purely domestic traffic,” Marcus wrote.

AT&T likely has 15 to 20 of these rooms around the country, and shipped data out of the rooms via a separate network to another location, Marcus concluded. Collectively, he estimated that the rooms were able to keep tabs on some 10 percent of the nation’s purely domestic internet traffic.

[Wired.com]