Pre-writing history

C-Net News via RawStory -

AT&T leaks sensitive info in NSA suit

AT&T's attorneys this week filed a 25-page legal brief striped with thick black lines that were intended to obscure portions of three pages and render them unreadable (click here for PDF).

But the obscured text nevertheless can be copied and pasted inside some PDF readers, including Preview under Apple Computer's OS X and the xpdf utility used with X11.

The deleted portions of the legal brief seek to offer benign reasons why AT&T would allegedly have a secret room at its downtown San Francisco switching center that would be designed to monitor Internet and telephone traffic.

"AT&T notes that the facts recited by plaintiffs are entirely consistent with any number of legitimate Internet monitoring systems, such as those used to detect viruses and stop hackers," the redacted pages say.

Now why would AT&T redact these "benign reasons"? It is a clear admission that the project IS NOT about monitoring telephone traffic. It is purely an Internet monitoring project. Why do I believe that? One simple reason:

YOU CANNOT "DETECT VIRUSES AND STOP HACKERS" ON A PHONE LINE!!!

Why do I keep reading what I wrote 6 months ago?

We have placed our monitoring devices at certain “target rich environments” on the Internet: the major switches and routers controlled by the carriers, the twenty or so hubs through which most of the world’s packets flow, most of which are located on U.S. territory. We have software, let’s say a package very similar to Snort, that can monitor and inspect these packets at around 2Gb/sec. Indeed, as we have seen, many carriers already have such monitors already in place and sell monitoring services to their customers (AT&T monitors). (Such tools are generally used to defend against a network attack based on patterns or signatures in the data.)

And they've even got a picture of it on their website.

Wonder what that little guy at the bottom is looking at?

Is he someone you know?

Is he someone you trust?