The Intercept revealed that the US security agency NSA has an agreement with AT&T to monitor Internet traffic, including from European and Italian operators, passing through its facilities. “The most important surveillance story you'll see for years,” called it Edward Snowden, the source of the revelations about online communications monitoring programs known as Nsagate.
The story that the best known whistleblower refers to is basically a map with addresses, and photos of anonymous, impenetrable-looking buildings. Within which, however, the interception operations of global Internet traffic by the American side are still carried out today. With the help of a US telecommunications giant. The NSA, the US national security agency, already widely implicated in the surveillance scandal revealed years ago by Snowden, uses 8 buildings of the telephone operator AT&T to continue to intercept vast amounts of email, national and international internet and telephone traffic that they pass on American soil. This was revealed by the newspaper The Intercept, which crossed the documents of the Snowden archive, of which it is the custodian, with research on open sources and interviews with former AT&T employees.
Some of these buildings had already been talked about in the past, but now the addresses and their function have been identified. Eight buildings in New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, DC that would be part of an NSA surveillance program known as Fairview, which began as early as 1985, and in which AT&T would be the only one operator involved.
The program consists of the “interception of cables for the transport of international traffic, routers and switches”, devices used for the routing of traffic and the interconnection of networks. In this way, the NSA would be able to monitor not only the data of AT&T and its customers, but also all the data that is exchanged between its network and other operators, and which then pass through the structures of the American telco.
Interception of traffic by European operators
The eight buildings identified "serve a specific function - writes The Intercept - to examine data from AT&T customers and also carry large amounts of data from other internet service providers." They are buildings for peering (the exchange of traffic between operators). An activity in which AT&T plays a central role in the USA, having a wide network on which other suppliers rely.
Among the companies that exchange traffic with AT&T there would be the American Sprint, Cogent, Level 3, and the Swedish Telia, the Indian Tata Communications, the German Deutsche Telekom, as well as the Italian Telecom Italia. “The exchange of data initially takes place outside the control of AT&T - writes The Intercept - in data centers of others, operators and controlled by companies such as Equinix. But the data is then routed - in whole or in part - through the eight AT&T buildings, where the NSA monitors them ”.
Moreover, a large part of the intercontinental Internet traffic passes through the United States, thanks to their geographical position and the prominence of American companies. In short, according to this reconstruction, AT&T would be used by the NSA to spy on the trafficking of foreign operators. For Snowden, this story would show how AT&T has become "the Internet's greatest enemy, covertly working [with the NSA] against its customers and partners to destroy your privacy." It is not the first time that the close relationship between AT&T and the NSA has emerged. As early as 2006 Mark Klein, a telephone company technician, revealed the existence of a room in the AT&T building in San Francisco dedicated to the NSA. The issue then returned to the fore in 2013, with Snowden's revelations of the NSA's surveillance and mass interception programs and systems known as Prism and Upstream. Programs that were supposed to expire in early 2018 but have been renewed by the Trump administration.