ATS: AT&T Narus Collaboration Sent Your Private Internet Communications to The NSA

Frightened thieves with clumsy gaits
Infiltrate the magick squares
Voices muted in their senseless states
A futile sorrow we must bare

Originally posted by soficrow

Originally posted by Bhadhidar

Back in January, I think it was, I tried to post a story to ATSNN about the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filing a class action suit against AT&T for violating its customer's privacy rights by collaborating with the NSA. The very suit which initiated this current action.

Not only was there Not A Single Response to my submission, But the submission was voted down as not related to a conspiracy!

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Appalling.

But FYI - according to the terms established here, this story is NOT a political conspiracy by ATS standards.




[edit on 10-4-2006 by soficrow]

I shared your puzzlement when this evaluation of "not a conspiracy" was made.

Apparently, there are some who have a conveniently narrow interpetation of the law, or at least , of the term.

As I pointed out in a U2U reply informing me that the submission had been turned down, the very definiton of a conspiracy is that two or more parties collude to violate the law.

If one or more of those parties is an Agency of the Government, be it the Federal or a local government, it must be considered a Political Conspiacy.

The allegation put forth in these stories is that an agency of the Federal Government, specifically, the National Security Agency, colluded with AT&T to violate at least California State law, and possibly federal law(s) regarding customer/citizen privacy.

The NSA may claim that it did not break the law since it acted solely under the orders of the President: who claims warrantless search authority under the "Use of Force" doctrine.

I consider this the "I was only following orders" defense; as disreputable now as it was at Nurenberg(sp?). Unfortunately, however, such an arguement might be held legally valid.

And a leak of classified intelligence isn't a leak of classified intelligence if the leaker is the one who makes the rules regarding leaks!

And, "It all depends on what your definition of 'is', is".

But AT&T cannot claim any special authority under the use of force act to violate the law. AT&T is bound, as I understand it, to at least the regulations set forth by the California PUC (Public Utilities Commission) to insure the privacy of its customers.

And those regulations specifically require a duely executed, valid warrant, in lieu of direct customer notification. They prohibit this type of "electronic rape" on the basis of a warrantless search.

If the people ar too few, unite them.

If the people are too ignorant, educate them.

If the people are too frightened, empower them.

If nothing else works, offer the people the spoils of the rich.


If the people do not care, they will perish.

the people do not care about saving their own lives, they have been programmed to fear the strenght of the system that is devastating them, and none of them are willing to consider how hard it would be to quit eating the poisoned food straight out of their hands.

Can you find a base they haven't covered?
"All your base are belong to us"

This is surprising how?

Grand delusions of civil liberties bedamned. We give up more every time we by mutual disinterest consent to free speech zones for presidential elections and other debilitating acts.

Heck we give up more by muddying the waters and giving citizens rights to protestors who are illegally residing in our sovereign territory.

We failled a long time ago, all you johnnie come latellies go home there's nothing to see here except another failure.

The same company (who also employs a former NSA head) working with AT&T to funnel your Internet communications through the NSA is working with the Chinese government to monitor and block VoIP communications.

Narus Inc Strikes Big Deal With Shanghai Telecom

Narus Inc., of Mountain View, California, announced a big deal on Wednesday. The Chinese telecom giant Shangai Telecom Co. Ltd. is interested in Narus Inc.’s new NarusInsightIP traffic processing system. This system will allow Shanghai Telecom to detect “unauthorized” VoIP call traffic. It will also enable Shanghai to mitigate rogue VoIP traffic on their network, letting the enhance the quality of service (QoS) for the users of properly configured and authorized VoIP services.

NARUS teams with Lucent Technologies to deliver industry's first IP Business Infrastructure solution for OC-48 carrier networks

FOR RELEASE WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 01, 1999

Lucent's breakthrough technology allows NARUS to scale semantic traffic analysis technology to meet the needs of the highest-speed IP networks

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. - (Editor's note: This release was issued by NARUS Inc.) NARUS Inc., the leading provider of IP Business Infrastructure (IBI) solutions, announced today that it will use breakthrough Optical Area Networking technology from Lucent Technologies (NYSE: LU) in its NARUS Semantics™ solutions. This will enable service providers to develop, price and deploy new services for their target customers at the speed of light.

Specifically, NARUS is integrating Lucent's OptiStar™ OC48 network adapter cards into its NARUS Semantics Analyzers, which form the first tier of its Semantic Traffic Analysis (STA) technology platform. With the new OptiStar-enabled devices from NARUS, service providers using optical networks will, for the first time, have real-time access to critical customer usage information, allowing them to better understand their customers' preferences, track network use, and provide services more closely tailored to their customers' needs.

"NARUS is dedicated to providing service providers of all sizes with the information they need to remain competitive, profitable, and customer-focused," stated Mark Stone, NARUS' President and COO. "This 'win-win' agreement using Lucent's advanced optical area networking technology will allow us to scale to meet the needs of any service provider on the planet - whether that provider has a customer base in the hundreds or millions."

Seven years ago, Narus was leading the way in the development of high-speed semantic Internet traffic analysis. We can assume that much has been accomplished since then.
Narus "In the News"

Sensitive documents surface in AT&T-NSA spy lawsuit

March 31, 2006 7:31 PM PST
It looks like the Electronic Frontier Foundation may have unearthed some highly sensitive documents about the National Security Agency's supersecret spy program.

The San Francisco-based advocacy group said on Friday that the Bush administration had objected to it including some internal AT&T documents with a scheduled court filing because the information may be classified. (In January, EFF sued AT&T over its alleged participation in the possibly-illegal scheme.)

More indication that AT&T had been directed by the administration to funnel their Internet and voice traffic through the NSA.

In December of last year, djohnsto77 posted this ATSNN Article when the government was first revealed (caught) for spying on us. People (that's us) argued that "it's not so bad! They're trying to catch terrorists! They're doing it to protect us." The people, (that's us) argued that this invasion of privacy does not affect us personally, so we don't have to be concerned about it. And besides, it's for a good cause. Terrorism! Oooga-Boooga!

In early February, I posted this ATSNN Story that detailed exactly what was to come. It even had Bush and Republican in the title! And there were about 4-5 participants in the thread, mostly arguing that I was bitching about nothing.

Here's a quote from page 3:

Officials with some of the nation's leading telecommunications companies have said they gave the NSA access to their switches, the hubs through which enormous volumes of phone and e-mail traffic pass every day, to aid the agency's effort to determine exactly whom suspected Qaeda figures were calling in the United States and abroad and who else was calling those numbers. The NSA used the intercepts to construct webs of potentially interrelated persons. (The Times, citing FBI sources, reported that most of these tips led to dead ends or to innocent Americans.)
Source

This is our own fault. This and every invasion and infringement on our rights, as a people, NOT personally, that we have been allowing over the past few years under the guise of "protection from terrorism". We could have been really taking an objective look at what's happening but we were more concerned with rooting for the home team and defending the "honor" of those who are screwing us right and left.

But it was more important to take up our stance against the 'other guys' than to see what was happening and prevent it.

As Sandra Day O'Connor said, "we must be ever-vigilant against those who would strong-arm the judiciary into adopting their preferred policies. It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings."

Well, we did nothing in the face of those beginnings and now we're going to have to deal with the ends. A dictatorship. A ruling government that has it's eyes, ears and fingers in our everyday private life. And we can rest assured in the knowledge that we willingly turned our privacy over to them and we therefore do not deserve it.

CNET News.com asked some telecommunication and internet companies if they were helping the NSA. Of course not one company said that they did turn over info to the NSA. Some, including AT&T declined to comment. Personally I think AT&T is just the tip of the iceberg.

Some companies helped the NSA, but which?

Some reports have identified executives at "major telecommunications companies" who chose to open their networks to the NSA. Because it may be illegal to divulge customer communications, though, not one has chosen to make its cooperation public.

Under federal law, any person or company who helps someone "intercept any wire, oral, or electronic communication"--unless specifically authorized by law--could face criminal charges. Even if cooperation is found to be legal, however, it could be embarrassing to acknowledge opening up customers' communications to a spy agency.

Originally posted by Bhadhidar

As I pointed out ...the very definiton of a conspiracy is that two or more parties collude to violate the law.

Conspiracy:

* a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful.

* when people secretly plan together to do something bad or illegal.

* An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.

* to plan secretly with other people to do something bad, illegal, or against someone's wishes.

Like other now-common government actions, the NSA colluding with Internet providers to infringe on our privacy is harmful, bad, wrongful, and against our wishes - and therefore a conspiracy.

IMO - The focus on legality to determine conspiracy is a red herring. This focus appropriates the power of awareness, engagement and judgment from the individual, and presumes that individuals must defer to legal professionals for their "expert" opinions.

The focus on legality is fundamentally disempowering, dismissive of democracy - and inappropriate. But hey, whatever works.


.



[edit on 11-4-2006 by soficrow]

< post deleted >

[edit on 11-4-2006 by alternateheaven]

Originally posted by alternateheaven

so what really are we to do?

Focus on the issue?

Demand change?

That's what's going to change. NOTHING.

As long as the genie (technology) makes it this EASY to intercept data they are going to intercept it PERIOD. They can make it invisible if we ever get it made "illegal".

The ONLY thing worth doing is to utterly BOYCOTT every company that caved in and handed over the data or access to it. HOW will you do that when the ONLY ISP available to you is owned by one of these companies?

The realities of life are big is watching and listening, he always has been and he always will.

IF you have a choice boycott AT&T and any other sell outs. The economics of the infrastructure of the web simply don't allow much more than a handful of backbone providers and guess which companies had the money or connections to get the backbone laid?

Elections won't fix this, like I said, IF this gets to the Supreme Court (it most likely won't) AND the good team wins the day, it won't change a dam thing, they will simply hide their activity and keep right on snooping. It's so easy it's child's play.

Springer...

Originally posted by Springer

Elections won't fix this, like I said, IF this gets to the Supreme Court (it most likely won't) AND the good team wins the day, it won't change a dam thing, they will simply hide their activity and keep right on snooping. It's so easy it's child's play.

Okay. I knew that. The art of Internet maintenance - protect yourself, don't play with technology if you don't understand it. Gotcha.

But. But, but. We're losing all our rights and freedoms. Are you saying we should just accept the situation? In every sphere? And cave?

Hmmmmm....

I'm definately speechless right now. The odds are incredibly against all of us. (And with that again I mean not only in the U.S.)

Originally posted by TheBandit795

The odds are incredibly against all of us.

Only if we allow and support corporate monopolies. IMO - we're witnessing corporate warfare around the globe and arm wrestling for control of the communications systems. This administration seems to be supporting one particular corporate faction (no, it's not American; the big boyz are nations unto themselves).

BUT - if we start clipping a few wings, can't we take back our nations? And our nations' political and economic power?

IMO - the real wars right now are about corporate entities taking on nations to claim their sovereignty - and secure global economic-political power. And yeah, some of our elected officials are helping them do it.

How do you fight the corporate monopolies, when you actually need them to even be able to communicate here on ATS??

Originally posted by TheBandit795

How do you fight the corporate monopolies, when you actually need them to even be able to communicate here on ATS??

How about not fight? Negotiate instead? Set terms? Establish constraints and parameters?

And do we really need corporate monopolies? It's our cash that keeps them going...


...I'm grasping here, but thinking in ecological terms. Ie., interrelated systems, focus on the component parts rather than the overriding global one.


Fact is though, I think it's the very nature of the beast that allows global surveillance. Like Springer said. It's a global system - so any abuses will be global. Does it really matter if it's the NSA, the Mafia, GE or some creative hacker doing the dirty deed?

IMO - it is precisely the susceptibility for abuse that will allow us to keep our Internet and our ability to communicate globally. It's a tradeoff. Toys for a spyhole.

Maybe we need to learn to speak in code to protect our privacy. Onward, back to Babylon.




.

Sofi if you will recall, the last time this topic came up I advised you and everyone else to start using encryption for all their e-mails. NSA can still read encrypted traffic, but not at the node point installations. Further, if the encryption key is at least 128 bits long it requires dedicated processing time to break. If enough people start using encryption the present eavsdropping situation will largely go away. To really make it go away will require the passage of new laws to prevent it.