AT&T cooperated extensively with NSA, Snowden documents reveal

Big Brother Probes Deep

• Benito Mussolini was right: "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power."

(PBS News)  -  New documents released by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden show that telecommunications giant AT&T was for years the most cooperative and prolific provider of Internet and phone data to the NSA.

While it was previously known that US telecommunications companies provided the NSA with information, the new documents detail the particularly close working relationship between AT&T and the intelligence agency, which one of the leaked documents described as “highly collaborative,” according to joint document review by The New York Times and ProPublica. Another described AT&T’s “extreme willingness to help.”

According to the documents, which cover a period from 2003 to 2013, AT&T shared billions of emails and phone records from its domestic networks with the spy agency.

The document review also shows that in addition to sharing information from its own networks, AT&T gave the NSA access to other the company’s networks: AT&T’s “corporate relationships provide unique accesses to other telecoms and I.S.P.s,” one document from 2013 states, using the acronym for “Internet service providers.”

One particularly striking revelation from the report is that, starting in 2011, AT&T began sharing 1.1 billion cellphone calling records per day with the NSA.

The documents also shed light on the voluntary nature of the information sharing. Because U.S. wiretapping laws do not apply to emails sent between citizens of foreign countries, telecommunication companies handed them them over to the NSA voluntarily, rather than in response to court orders, the report said.

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