AT&T agreed to allow large portions of sealed documents that sit at the heart of an anti-spying case against the telecom giant which alleges the company illegally installed secret surveillance rooms in its internet facilities at the behest of the National Security Agency.  The case brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in January 2006 relies on documents provided to the group by Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician who took three documents home with him when he retired in 2004. 

AT&T acceded to the disclosure only after the EFF threatened to ask a federal appeals court to unseal documents that had been published by  Wired News and Frontline, which would have forced the company's lawyers into the embarrassing position of arguing that documents available on the internet for more than a year were secret, according to Cindy Cohn, the EFF's legal director. 

Those documents, along with a signed declaration from Klein and an interpretation of the documents by internet expert J. Scott Marcus, were kept mostly under wraps by court order that applied to the parties in the case. However, Wired News was able to independently acquire significant portions of the wiring diagrams, equipment list and task orders, and published them in May 2006.  Today's newly released portions of the Hepting documents confirm that the Wired documents are the same as those under seal. 

The document release comes as AT&T, the EFF and the government prepare to battle in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in August, where the government and AT&T seek to overturn lower court order allowing the case to proceed.  The government argues that the case must be thrown out since it involves national security matters, while AT&T says it can't defend itself without spilling classified information.  Federal district court Judge Vaughn Walker ruled last July that the case could proceed because the president admitted the existence of the NSA's warrantless wiretapping of Americans' overseas communications. 

"Dismissing this case at the outset would sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security," Walker wrote.

The interpretation of Klein's documents by Marcus, a former CTO for GTE and a former advisor to the FCC, are the most interesting documents released today. 

"This configuration appears to have the capability to enable surveillance and analysis of internet content on a massive scale, including both overseas and purely domestic traffic," Marcus wrote. 

AT&T likely has 15 to 20 of these rooms around the country, shipped data out of the rooms via a separate network to another location and collectively, the rooms were able to keep tabs on some 10% of the nation's purely domestic intenret traffic, according to Marcus. 

The obvious and natural design for a massive surveillance system for IPO-based data, and the one most cost-effective to implement, would in my judgment be comprised of the following elements:  

(1) massive data capture at the locations where the data can be tapped,  

(2) high speed screening and reduction of the captured data at the point of capture in order to identify data of interest,  

(3) shipment of the data of interest to one or two central collection points for more detailed analysis, and  

(4) intensive analysis and cross correlation of the data of interest by very powerful processing engines at the central location or locations.  

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