Last Sunday’s New York Times published a front-page story with new revelations about the collaboration between the National Security Agency and leading American high-tech corporations — in this case the giant telecommunications company AT&T. The headline: “AT&T Helped U.S. Spy on Internet on a Vast Scale.”
The article, published in collaboration with ProPublica, stemmed from the seemingly endless supply of documents purloined by Edward Snowden, and leaked in strategically timed portions, since 2013.
Reuters picked up the story, and tech publications — PC World, Wired, Ars Technica — jumped on it. Further, privacy groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation immediately decried the alleged new evidence of NSA trampling on the Fourth Amendment.
But what is striking is that so far the revelations have had not much impact or triggered the huge reaction and editorial comments elicited by the original Snowden documents or those that immediately followed. The lack of response no doubt betokens a numbness from the cascade of revelations that reached a dramatic crescendo throughout the closing months of 2013 and well into 2014. At this point, it is difficult to discern just what is new and what is old news — but here goes.
On the old news front, we have known from past revelations that U.S. companies — either willingly or through judicial coercion — have cooperated with U.S. intelligence agencies such as the NSA and CIA. Thus, the New York Times story’s revelation that AT&T has given the NSA access to metadata (dates, times, place, but not actual conversation) phone calls under various U.S. security laws and court orders is not news.
The cooperation actually goes back to the 1980s, but became much more wide-ranging after 9/11. For instance, after 9/11, AT&T participated in the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping programs, which were not formally legalized (and the companies immunized) until 2008. It also provided technical assistance to NSA surveillance programs; it installed surveillance equipment on at least 17 of its Internet hubs on American soil; and it collaborated in a program to monitor United Nations’ Internet traffic.
Much of what can be labeled new in the Times report relates to the magnitude and scope of the programs, as well as AT&T’s extremely close relations with the NSA.
Starting in 2003, AT&T joined other companies in an NSA program known as Fairview, a mass surveillance program that forwarded to the agency 400 billion Internet metadata records. In 2011, AT&T began handling 1.1 billion domestic cellphone records a day for the NSA (this cellphone data collection disclosure by the Times story was news; after Snowden, administration officials had admitted only to landline interventions).
AT&T is also likely to face important new questions from foreign telecom operators from the disclosure that, as one NSA document stated, its “corporate relationship provides unique accesses to other telecoms and ISPs.”
Much worldwide Internet data flows through American cables, and much of that through AT&T. It is not illegal under U.S. law to target foreigners communicating with other foreigners, and this allowed AT&T and other companies to provide massive amounts of data from foreign sources — 60 million foreign-to-foreign emails per day by 2013.
Finally, the company will also be discomfited by the quite sincere compliments from NSA officials contained in the documents. One document praises AT&T for its “extreme willingness to help,” while another describes the relationship as “highly collaborative.” And one document admonishes NSA staff to be accommodating when visiting AT&T facilities, stating, “This is a partnership, not a contractual relationship.”
The Snowden documents, from which the Times story originated, date only to 2013; so it is not clear just which collaborations still operate or under what rules. In the end, AT&T may be lucky — and even a lead Sunday story in the New York Times may just go to the top of the heap of other Snowden revelations without repercussions of its own.
