all politics is local
...and no, I don't mean fuzzy things like buying local food or even biking to work.
I mean the War on Fucking Terror, right here, right now.
Documents under court-ordered seal have recently been published by Wired, about how telecom companies are cooperating with various US domestic spy agencies in spying on domestic internet and phone traffic.
That's old news, actually.
There are new wrinkles, though -- read the entire article, because it's actually riveting. And important.
The main bullet points:
- Starting with AT&T, the government set up secret "server rooms" in telco offices to hack into fiber-optic internet traffic, diverting a portion of the light signal to the server room for rerouting to a central location in Virginia. The secret server room is in the SBC building on Folsom St., deep in the financial district of SF.
- There are other "secret" server rooms, mostly operating on the West Coast: Seattle, Portland, San Jose, and Los Angeles are among the rumored locations.
- The plans for this domestic surveillance were drawn up in 2002 as part of the appropriately-Orwellian "Total Information Awareness" program, but when the proto-agency was forced to disband and its director (the old Iran-Contra figure John Poindexter) resigned, Congress made a big show out of denying funding to most aspects of the program, but quietly held funding for parts of the program deemed useful. The spying program is one of these holdovers.
- When I worked at a certain hated former company, I'd walk past that SBC building in the Financial District every day. Considering that this secret room was designed and implemented right when I was working not a mile away, that makes it especially weird.
- SBC was also subject to a labor strike during this time (I witnessed the strike myself for a few days going to work), since many telco companies use unionized labor. The new federal focus on surveillance goes hand-in-hand with union busting, as one unionized force in AT&T that would've been involved with this was fired and rehired on a non-union basis.
- The new wrinkle of the military-industrial complex is, to no one's surprise, surveillance. Companies hoping to cash in on the surveillance boom are falling over themselves to secure lucrative government boondoggles. One of these, a Silicon Valley company, became responsible for devising the sifting software sitting on top of the telcos' traffic-monitoring systems.
- In light of the defense procurement scandals seen recently, it's a whole new level of politically-connected pay-to-play gamesmanship going on. With one party controlling the purse strings and defense lobbying, and the other party looking on somewhat greedily.
All hail the new Politburo!
In that vein, I'll just say the following: dirty bomb terror Afghanistan terrorism Al-Jazeera Iraq Osama jihad jihad 4th Amendment the dog barks at midnight explode Koran.
Fascist asshats.
EDIT: In addition to being a tech geek, I'm a law geek too. Here's the asinine justification used in the attempt to quash the EFF's class-action suit against AT&T: the mere fact that the government is a party in a lawsuit involving state secrets, even if the substance of the suit turns on governmental misconduct, means that the State Secrets Act is invoked and the lawsuit itself is quashed. Never mind keeping secrets under seal and letting the suit go foward on that basis.
Another very interesting article courtesy of Slate.
Again: fascist asshats.