Documents purportedly at the heart of a lawsuit accusing AT&T of
collaborating with the National Security Agency to snoop on Americans appeared
Monday on the Web, possibly shedding new light on surveillance techniques but
also intensifying debate over the publication of leaked documents related to
national security.
An entrance to a room used for spying at AT&T's Folsom Street office. (Photo: Wired News)
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Wired News posted 29 pages that Editor in Chief Evan Hansen said were
obtained from an unnamed source close to the lawsuit brought in January by the
Electronic Frontier Foundation against AT&T. The foundation accuses AT&T of
illegally turning over tens of millions of telephone and Internet records to
the NSA in what it calls a "massive and illegal program to wiretap and
data-mine Americans' communications."
At the heart of the foundation's suit are documents submitted by Mark
Klein, an AT&T technician for 22 years until he left in 2004. Klein said he had
seen equipment installed at AT&T's San Francisco headquarters that would allow
the NSA to screen huge volumes of customers' data.
Experts who reviewed the Wired News documents posted Monday -- which
include technical descriptions and depictions of equipment at the AT&T office
-- said that they were consistent with such surveillance but that the material
did not provide conclusive proof of actual surveillance.
"It may look like a duck and quack like a duck but not be a duck," said
Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on
Government Secrecy. "It would be a mistake to presume that we know more than we
do ... (but) it's another piece of the puzzle."
Although the foundation submitted the documents under seal in April to
support its case, their contents were described by the New York Times and other
publications later that month. Last week, Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn
Walker continued the seal pending a June 23 hearing on a government motion
seeking to have the suit dismissed in the interests of national security.
Hansen said that while Walker's order makes it impossible to compare the
documents posted by Wired News with the sealed documents, he believes Wired
News obtained about a third of the material filed by the foundation.
Hansen said that the documents were obtained legally from a source other
than Klein and that Wired News will seek to have the seal lifted on all the
documents filed with the court. As for criticism that publication of the
documents could compromise security, Hansen argued that the court would not
have declined AT&T's request that the foundation return its copies of the
material if sensitive national security secrets were involved.
"This is an extremely important case for the public," Hansen said. "It
speaks to the breadth of the surveillance of American citizens. For us, the
public's right to know superseded AT&T's claims of secrecy."
Neither AT&T officials nor engineers cited in the documents returned calls
seeking comment on the Wired News story.
The documents include reports bearing the AT&T logo, schematics, press
releases and articles describing technology allegedly used in the surveillance
as well as photos of a nondescript door that Klein maintains is a "secret room"
inside AT&T's Folsom Street facility.
According to the documents' introduction, which Wired News reported was
written by Klein, that door concealed "computer gear for a government spy
operation ... only people with security clearance from the National Security
Agency can enter this room."
Behind the door, according to the documents, was a 24-by-48-foot room
containing servers, routers and an industrial-size air conditioner. High-speed
fiber-optic circuits are routed from AT&T's backbone servers to the room, where
the documents suggest a special "splitter" routes part of the light signal to a
device designed to collect and analyze high-speed and high-volume data.
"These installations enable the government to look at every individual
message on the Internet and analyze exactly what people are doing," Klein
wrote, according to Wired News. "This is the infrastructure for an Orwellian
police state. It must be shut down!"
It appears, at least in the documents posted by Wired News, that Klein was
describing a system partly based on his own observations, partly on what the
documents call "educated guesses," and partly on conclusions drawn from
different sources.
That said, the highly detailed nature of the documents tends to support
their veracity, Aftergood said.
"It's rather detailed, which I think lends it some credibility, because
there are many ways it could be shown to be wrong or inauthentic, and no one
has done so," he said.
On the other hand, the documents could accurately describe a system at
AT&T but misstate the system's intent, said Steven Bellovin, a computer science
professor at Columbia University who worked previously at AT&T Labs Research.
"There are all sorts of reasons for doing network monitoring," said
Bellovin, citing as examples a company's desire to monitor network traffic to
make sure that it is being routed efficiently and that other companies are
adhering to their traffic-routing agreements.
Some of the document's claims don't stand up well technically, Bellovin
said -- the claim that the entire Internet was being monitored, for example,
was "quite an exaggeration ... there's no one place you can tap the Internet,"
he said.
On the other hand, Bellovin said, nothing in the document proves that the
described network is not a surveillance system -- and the claim that only
NSA-cleared personnel could go into the "secret room" supports the theory.
"Without more information, it's impossible to say just what's going on
there," said Bellovin.
The Wired News story comes amid a controversy about government
surveillance and the press' coverage of the programs.
Previous stories have alleged NSA surveillance of phone calls and data
mining of Americans' phone records. The stories have been cheered by critics of
expanded government surveillance and denounced by others who suggest such
stories harm national security.
On Sunday, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said he believes that
the federal government has the power to prosecute journalists and news
organizations that publish such material. "There are some statutes on the book,
which, if you read the language carefully, would seem to indicate that that is
a possibility," Gonzales told ABC's "This Week."
As of Monday afternoon, Wired News had not been contacted by any federal
officials, AT&T or the court since publishing the story.
"Truly as a legal matter, they're on pretty solid legal grounds," said
Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition.
Scheer's organization co-signed a letter with Wired News last week asking
the court to keep the proceedings open to the press, but it has not taken a
position on the merits of the case.
The Wired News documents seem to suggest business sensitivity but not
enough to support a court sealing, Scheer said. To First Amendment guardians,
he said, the greater concern is what reaction federal officials might have to
the leak of classified documents.
"We are seeing an extraordinary degree of anxiety on the government's part
about reporting based on leaks of confidential documents in the government's
possession," Scheer said. "I think the Justice Department is about to take the
gloves off in its pursuit of information the press has. And the press is about
to lose its ability to use confidential sources."
©2006 San Francisco Chronicle
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