JWZ posts regarding NSA interception, citing Wired :-

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.

In papers filed late Monday, AT&T argued that confidential technical documents provided by an ex-AT&T technician to the Electronic Frontier Foundation shouldn’t be used as evidence in the case and should be returned.

The documents, which the EFF filed under a temporary seal last Wednesday, purportedly detail how AT&T diverts internet traffic to the National Security Agency via a secret room in San Francisco and allege that such rooms exist in other AT&T switching centers.

[…]

AT&T built a secret room in its San Francisco switching station that funnels internet traffic data from AT&T Worldnet dialup customers and traffic from AT&T’s massive internet backbone to the NSA, according to a statement from Klein.

Klein’s duties included connecting new fiber-optic circuits to that room, which housed data-mining equipment built by a company called Narus, according to his statement.

Narus’ promotional materials boast that its equipment can scan billions of bits of internet traffic per second, including analyzing the contents of e-mails and e-mail attachments and even allowing playback of internet phone calls.

I suppose the primary importance of this is as a impeach-Bush “smoking gun” or similar, for authorising domestic surveillance upon the American people by the NSA. Although I have nothing pertinent to add on that topic, I have always wondered about the collusion of US and UK security services with bodies outside of the realms of Government.

I was at UCL in the mid/late ’80s, and amongst the technically inclined students there was a rumour that the computer science department’s dual-processor Pyramid – today a nearly forgotten computing marque – had been purchased for the department by an American Three Letter Agency.

Given the parlous state of university funding at the time, this seemed vaguely plausible – but beyond this point the rumour diverged.

Certainly the US DoD (three letters) would have been involved at some level via ARPA – the UCL CompSci Pyramid was a major ARPANet node (ucl-cs.arpa) and might well have been purchased under a grant / with help from ARPA in order to test long-distance networking or somesuch.

The political colombian-bean-roasting, Ché-shirt wearing nutters in the student union saw the hand of the CIA (three letters) everywhere, and so that was their favourite explanation for everything.

Now with 20 years hindsight and a better knowledge of what was expensive back then – and in the 80s the cost of equipment and decent sustained network bandwidth was enormously more expensive than hardware – I am inclined to remember a boozy evening with a muckraking journalist, former Pi-hack and ex-UCL CompSci student, who told me that “a branch of the DoD” also paid for a “network room” in the basement of the CompSci building, with “a leg on every major network in Europe”, which provided a locus for information exchange – a “funnel” – which could be used to intercept and gather information.

Access to the room was strictly controlled.

Of course this is all rumour, and it could all be paranoid hogwash; but I am inclined to believe it to some extent, not least because in that era the technological acheivement of doing networking at all rather greyed the boundaries between bridging TCP/IP, X.25/PSS and BITNET, and monitoring of the same for intelligence gathering.