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AT&T helped the NSA spy on the UN's internet traffic (updated)
It's no secret that telecoms have cooperated with the US' surveillance efforts, but at least one was unusually eager to help out. Thanks to Edward Snowden leaks, both the New York Times and ProPublica have discovered that AT&T not only agreed to aid the National Security Agency's spying campaigns for decades, but has shown an "extreme willingness" to participate. It was the first to start forwarding internet metadata (like email participants) to the NSA in 2003, and was quick to offer call metadata in 2011. Moreover, AT&T helped the NSA snoop on the all of the internet traffic at the United Nations' New York City headquarters -- Snowden's leaks had previously revealed that the UN monitoring was taking place, but not the carrier involved.
NSA collecting 5 billion cellphone location records per day
Hey everyone, the government's tracking you. Quelle surprise. In what has to be one of the least shocking pieces of news to come from the Edward Snowden leaks, The Washington Post is reporting that the National Security Agency has been gathering surveillance data on foreign cellphone users' whereabouts globally, with some Americans potentially caught in the net. The database, which collects about 5 billion records per day, is so vast that not even the NSA has the proper tools to sift through it all. That's not to say the agency hasn't been able to make "good" use of it with analytics programs, though. One such program, ominously labeled Co-Traveler, allows the NSA to determine "behaviorally relevant relationships" based on data from signals intelligence activity designators (or sigads for short) located around the world, including one codenamed "Stormbrew." That's a lot of jargon for what are essentially data hubs that collect geolocation information down to the cell tower level. Co-Traveler can locate targets of interest based on cellphone users moving in tandem, even if they're unknown threats -- frequent meetups with an existing suspect could reveal a close associate, for instance. As we've come to expect by now, both the NSA and the Office of the Director for National Intelligence argue that this location-based surveillance is legal. Agency representatives tell the Post that the collection system doesn't purposefully track Americans. However, the NSA also says it can't determine how many US residents get swept up in these location scans; there are concerns that it's following targets protected by Fourth Amendment search rights. Jon Fingas contributed to this report.
