http://socialistaction.org/snowden-exposes-new-nsa-spying/
Snowden exposes new NSA spying
Published August 26, 2015. | By Socialist Action.
Jan. 2014 Snowden 1
By JEFF MACKLER
Edward Snowden, renowned for his 2013 exposure of all pervasive U.S.
government Internet and telephone spying on virtually all Americans, if
not the entire world (no exaggeration), has once again blown the cover
off corporate America’s collaboration with the nation’s top super-spy
entity, the National Security Administration (NSA).
Snowden’s most recent revelations—once again, documents from the NSA
itself—were released to The New York Times and ProPublica. They refer to
AT&T’s “highly collaborative” relationship with the NSA and its “extreme
willingness to help.”
AT&T, utilizing a series of what The Times refers to as “legal rules”
and secret court orders, provided the NSA with billions of e-mails,
including all such communications to and from the United Nations, an
AT&T customer. While the Snowden-released documents did not specifically
mention that AT&T was the central NSA source, The Times and ProPublica
investigators confirmed “a constellations of evidence” and other
confirmations from “several former intelligence officials” implicating AT&T.
The NSA’s spy operations were conducted through its secret Fairview
program, established in 1985 and ramped up immediately following the
Sept. 11, 2001, World Trade Center bombings. The Fairview documents,
according to The Times, contained “technical jargon specific to AT&T.”
In one month shortly after the 9/11 bombings, AT&T collected 400 billion
internet meta-data records, leading the top government surveillance
agency to brag—secretly, of course—that the NSA has a “live presence on
the global net.” The Orwellian notion that Big Brother is listening all
the time has the ring of truth today.
While previous Snowden revelations had exposed NSA spying on the UN,
AT&T was not known as its direct vehicle until The Times investigations
in recent weeks,. AT&T representatives, when asked to verify the
veracity of the Snowden documents, replied, “We don’t comment on matters
of national security.”
Similarly, in response to AT&T customer lawsuits and a myriad of other
legal filings aimed at ending government surveillance, U.S. courts have
repeatedly upheld Obama administration pleadings arguing that a public
exposé of government spying would reveal “state secrets that would be
damaging to national security.”
In the name of “national security,” the government’s legal machinery
repeatedly insists, almost always with court approval, that the
Constitution’s Fourth Amendment guarantees of the “right to privacy “and
“protection against unreasonable search and seizure” are essentially
worthless. Indeed, any “laws” or constitutional interpretations that
were previously on the books to protect privacy, freedom of association,
and other hard won democratic rights are today routinely
re-written—formally as legislation or behind the scenes in the form of
secret court orders that trample fundamental rights.
While the 2013 worldwide outcry against U.S. government surveillance of
close to all internet and cell-phone communications around the world—a
formal goal secretly stated by the NSA—has subsided, little or nothing
has changed. The Times could only wonder, for example, whether the UN
spying continues to this day.
The new Snowden documents point to the Special Service Operations (SSO)
division of the NSA as the secret cover for AT&T and other internet
providers like Verizon, also exposed as a government surveillance
collaborator but of a lesser magnitude in comparison to AT&T. The SSO
accounts for 80 percent of the information that the NSA collects.
AT&T’s explicit “partnership” with the NSA was quite lucrative indeed,
yielding in 2011 alone $188.9 million to the nation’s top internet
provider at the time and “extremely willing” collaborator.
AT&T’s services went far beyond spying on the United Nations. At the
behest of the NSA, it installed the agency’s then experimental spy
equipment in 17 of its national internet hubs and collected virtually
everything that came its way, including “foreign to foreign” and
“foreign to U.S.” communications.
Following the 2013 Snowden exposés, the NSA claimed that its UN spying
operations, “for technical reasons” only, was limited to mostly
land-line calls. This too has now been exposed as a lie, with the new
Snowden documents revealing that in 2011 alone the AT&T turned over 1.1
billion domestic cell-phone calls daily to the NSA.
NSA technology now collects bulk metadata on virtually everyone. In
addition, it appears to have achieved the capacity to record the names
and phone numbers of all callers and recipients. A simple click or two
on an NSA computer can well open the door to everyone’s personal,
political, and economic affairs.
The U.S. emerging police state only awaits the moment when mass
surveillance passes over to mass repression, the ultimate weapon
employed by all ruling-class elites when massive and generalized
discontent becomes clearly focused and directly threatens capitalist
rule itself. At that special and inevitable moment in history when the
vast majority become conscious of their exploitation and oppression and
move to fundamentally challenge their domination by the few, history
will once again record the birth of a new society free from all the
horrors of the present decaying social order.
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Posted in Civil Liberties, Police & FBI. | Tagged AT&T, NSA, Snowden,
spying, surveillance.
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