Pensieri di un lunatico minore

Hooverveillance

It’s widely known that the NSA uses the “suck it all out of the air, wires and everything else” method of collecting data. There is minimal intellegence at the edge of their collection network, and instead, they largely attempt to collect anything and everything that they can “see.” Some of this is documented in The Puzzle Palace and more in Body of Secrets which look into the mysterious world of the National Security Agency.

Recently, it’s come to light that the NSA is collecting a lot of information that is likely illegal, probably unconstitutional, and definately has a chilling effect on freedom of speech. While I don’t want to get into why I think this is a subversive behavior against the very foundations of this Nation and is perhaps one of the most severe breaches of public trust since COINTELPRO. The scope is awe-inspiring, and the effect is exceptional.

Finally, an AT&T engineer has come forward to discuss his company’s involvement in what’s going on. Apparantly, AT&T, with full concious choice, decided to play along and provide the conduit for all this data. It is likely that other players did so as well, as AT&T is hardly the largest IP backbone in the world. When I was at Sprint and would have known if this was going on in the mid 1990s, I can assure people it wasn’t then.

I suspect that much of this came about in the late 1990s and early 2000 when I began hearing rumblings at the exchange points of government monitoring. Who knows for sure as denial is the air that many people breathe in this industry, but certainly this has a long-term effect on the perception, if not reality, of freedom in the United States. Our behaviors are beginning to look more and more like those we claim to oppose than what we claim to believe in.

Update: It seems that AT&T doesn’t want anyone to know what a sell-out it is, according to Wired magazine:

AT&T is seeking the return of technical documents presented in a lawsuit that allegedly detail how the telecom giant helped the government set up a massive internet wiretap operation in its San Francisco facilities.

I wouldn’t want everyone to know I was an agent to overturn the Constitution either, but you’ll note they wouldn’t be claiming they are “confidential technical documents” if they weren’t real.