NSA in STL?
In a previous post, I linked to a Wired News article detailing the NSA’s warrantless domestic wiretap program. The article was accompanied by copies of sealed documents describing the NSA operation, including details of a secret facility housed in an AT&T building located in nearby Bridgeton, Missouri.
Today, FiredUp! Missouri links to a new Salon feature describing what’s going on out in Bridgeton:
June 21, 2006 | In a pivotal network operations center in metropolitan St. Louis, AT&T has maintained a secret, highly secured room since 2002 where government work is being conducted, according to two former AT&T workers once employed at the center.
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The importance of the Bridgeton facility is its role in managing the “common backbone” for all of AT&T’s Internet operations. According to one of the former workers, Bridgeton serves as the technical command center from which the company manages all the routers and circuits carrying the company’s domestic and international Internet traffic. Therefore, Bridgeton could be instrumental for conducting surveillance or collecting data.
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“You’re talking about a backbone for computer communications, and that’s NSA,” Russ Tice, a former high-level NSA intelligence officer, told Salon. Tice, a 20-year veteran of multiple U.S. intelligence agencies, worked for the NSA until spring 2005. “Whatever is happening there with the security you’re talking about is a whole lot more closely held than what’s going on with the Klein case” in San Francisco, he said. (The San Francisco room is secured only by a special combination lock, according to the Klein documents.)
Go read it.
By the way, you’re reading this via a web server connected to AT&T’s data network in St. Louis, Missouri, so you might be pleased to learn that Missouri regulators have finally stepped up to the plate for Missourians:
State regulators in Missouri have issued subpoenas to AT&T, demanding to know whether the company is violating consumer privacy laws by sharing customer phone and Internet records with the government.
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Gaw and Clayton said they have legal and moral obligations to enforce state consumer-privacy laws: “We want to know if private information of law-abiding Missourians is being illegally released by AT&T,” they said in a statement Tuesday.
FiredUp! Missouri has more.
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