The NSA, AT&T And The Secrets Of Room 641A

Our final observation on the matter of the US government, no longer accountable to anyone, and treating its citizens as indentured debt serfs who are entitled to precisely zero privacy rights, comes from Stephen Wolfson and "The NSA, AT&T And The Secrets Of Room 641A."

It is an impartial view of what is really going on in the world of communication surveillance. The reality is that while the NSA, which is a public entity through and through, is allowed and expected to do whatever its superiors tell it (i.e., the White House), how does one justify the complete betrayal of their customers by private corporations such as Verizon and AT&T? This may be the most insidious and toxic symbiosis between the public and private sector in the recent past. Because if private telecom corporations are willing to bend all the rules when it comes to the US government, just what do all the other companies operating in the US have to do to appease first the Bush and now the Obama administrations?

From the paper:
This note discusses the possible existence of a domestic surveillance/data collection program conducted by the National Security Agency (“NSA”) with the assistance of AT&T, and the implications of such a program under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (“ECPA”). This article first examines a May 11, 2006 USA Today article reporting that the NSA was given access to a huge number of call records from AT&T. Next, it turns to the story of former AT&T technician Mark Klein and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (“EFF”) case, Hepting v. AT&T Corporation. Klein claims that the NSA has built a “secret room” in AT&T’s San Francisco switching center that grants the agency access to a vast amount of customer information. In Hepting, the EFF alleges that AT&T violated the Stored Communications Act, Title II of the ECPA; the Wiretap Act, Title I of the ECPA; and the Pen Register Statute, Title III of the ECPA. Finally, this article addresses the Protect America Act of 2007 and provides analysis of expert opinions in the field.

More