8 AT&T buildings that are ‘central to NSA spying’

Have you ever wondered what locations on American soil serve as backbone or “peering” facilities that the NSA might secretly be using for eavesdropping purposes?

The Intercept revealed eight such AT&T-owned locations: two in California, one in Washington, another in Washington, D.C., one in New York, one in Texas, one in Illinois, and one in Georgia. You might pass by these AT&T buildings having no idea that they are “central to an NSA spying initiative that has for years monitored billions of emails, phone calls, and online chats passing across U.S. territory.”

While neither AT&T nor NSA spokespeople would confirm that the NSA has tapped into data at these eight locations that normally route telecom companies’ data traffic, former AT&T employees did confirm the locations of the “backbone node with peering” facilities. AT&T refers to the peering sites as “Service Node Routing Complexes.”

The Intercept explained various code-named NSA surveillance programs, previously made public thanks to Edward Snowden, which seem to have taken place at these eight AT&T facilities.

In addition, the Intercept article cites “a top-secret NSA memo” that “has not been disclosed before;” the memo “explained that the agency was collecting people’s messages en masse if a single one were found to contain a ‘selector’ – like an email address or phone number – that featured on a target list.”

“One example of this is when a user of a webmail service accesses her inbox; if the inbox contains one email message that contains an NSA tasked selector, NSA will acquire a copy of the entire inbox, not just the individual email message that contains the tasked selector,” the memo stated.

The NSA’s past activity

There’s a bit of a history lesson included in the article, going over how the NSA was hoovering emails if they mentioned information about surveillance targets, including domestic communications that violated citizens’ Fourth Amendment right to be protected against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The NSA moved to using a cautionary banner that warned analysts not to read the communication unless it had been lawfully obtained. The NSA acknowledged the violations in April 2017. The messages had reportedly been part of upstream surveillance allowed under Executive Order 12333. After receiving a NSA memo via Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request, the ACLU previously warned that NSA analysts might even be “laughing at your sex tape” thanks to surveillance under EO 12333.

At any rate, according to The Intercept, the eight AT&T buildings that have secretly served as NSA spying hubs for monitoring “billions of emails, phone calls, and online chats” – codenamed FAIRVIEW for NSA surveillance – are located at:

• 30 E Street Southwest in Washington, D.C.
• 1122 3rd Avenue in Seattle, Washington
• 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco, California
• 811 10th Avenue in New York City
• 420 South Grand Avenue in Los Angeles, California
• 4211 Bryan Street in Dallas, Texas
• 10 South Canal Street in Chicago, Illinois
• 51 Peachtree Center Avenue in Atlanta, Georgia