AT&T Whisteblower: Feds also listening in on Web traffic, email - not just phone

Americans were rightly outraged when they learned Bush and Co may be listening to select phone conversations. Let’s see what happens when they find out Bush/NSA also monitors Web traffic, email, and anything else that may come across AT&T’s routers:

It would be difficult to say whose e-mail, text messages or Internet phone calls the government is monitoring at any given time, but according to a former AT&T employee, the government has warrantless access to a great deal of Internet traffic should they care to take a peek.

As information is traded between users it flows also into a locked, secret room on the sixth floor of AT&T’s San Francisco offices and other rooms around the country — where the U.S. government can sift through and find the information it wants, former AT&T employee Mark Klein alleged Wednesday at a press conference on Capitol Hill.

“An exact copy of all Internet traffic that flowed through critical AT&T cables — e-mails, documents, pictures, Web browsing, voice-over-Internet phone conversations, everything — was being diverted to equipment inside the secret room,” he said.

Klein, who worked for more than 20 years as a technician at AT&T, said that the highly secretive electronics-focused National Security Agency began working with telecom companies to gain wholesale access to vast amounts of data traveling over the Internet.

(…) Klein said only a management-level employee with NSA security clearance was allowed inside, but documents he obtained form AT&T showed that highly sophisticated data mining equipment was kept there. ABC News