Wired News releases documents from AT&T spying lawsuit

Wired News has released documents from the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against AT&T, in which former employee Mark Klein alleges that the telecom built secret rooms in its facilities to accomodate the NSA's domestic surveillance operations. This is an excerpt from a document Klein wrote during 2004, comparing the AT&T set up to what was then known as the "Total Information Awareness" program, aspects of which seem to have been incorporated into the current NSA domestic surveillance program:

In 2003 AT&T built "secret rooms" hidden deep in the bowels of its central offices in various cities, housing computer gear for a government spy operation which taps into the company's popular WorldNet service and the entire internet. These installations enable the government to look at every individual message on the internet and analyze exactly what people are doing. Documents showing the hardwire installation in San Francisco suggest that there are similar locations being installed in numerous other cities. . .

. . . In San Francisco the "secret room" is Room 641A at 611 Folsom Street, the site of a large SBC phone building, three floors of which are occupied by AT&T. High-speed fiber-optic circuits come in on the 8th floor and run down to the 7th floor where they connect to routers for AT&T's WorldNet service, part of the latter's vital "Common Backbone." In order to snoop on these circuits, a special cabinet was installed and cabled to the "secret room" on the 6th floor to monitor the information going through the circuits. (The location code of the cabinet is 070177.04, which denotes the 7th floor, aisle 177 and bay 04.) The "secret room" itself is roughly 24-by-48 feet, containing perhaps a dozen cabinets including such equipment as Sun servers and two Juniper routers, plus an industrial-size air conditioner.

The normal work force of unionized technicians in the office are forbidden to enter the "secret room," which has a special combination lock on the main door. The telltale sign of an illicit government spy operation is the fact that only people with security clearance from the National Security Agency can enter this room.
[Wired News]

"Whistle-Blower's Evidence, Uncut" [Wired News]
"Why We Published the AT&T Docs" [Wired News]

UPDATED 5/24/06:

BusinessWeek has an interesting article on the federal government's practice of amassing personal data by buying databases from the private sector.

"The Snooping Goes Beyond Phone Calls" [BusinessWeek]