Wired blows the whistle on AT&T

Caption: the entrance to the "Secret Room" in San Francisco, Room 641


The US media and the US public feigned a level of indignant outrage when, in December last year, the New York Times broke the news that President Bush had authorised the National Spy Agency (NSA) to listen-in on peoples' telephone calls without first going through the relevant courts to get a warrant. The wire-tapping arrangement had been in place since Bush first signed off on the decision a few months after the S11 attacks, and Bush has sinced claimed the temporary powers Congress gave him in the days after September 11 were enough for him to allow the NSA to listen in on US citizens without a warrant.

Then, not long ago, came the news that one of the world's largest telecommunications companies, AT&T, was believed to have been implicit in helping the NSA tap US citizens' phones and internet by installing computer equipment designed to monitor who was calling where, or the websites they were looking at. The question of how closely AT&T worked with the NSA is now before a Californian court, but the battle has turned to documents currently being kept secret by the San Francisco judge overseeing the case, in the name of, according to AT&T anyway, commercial concerns.

A group of some of the US's most important newspapers and press agencies - The LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Bloomberg, Associated Press etc - have all applied to bring the evidence into the public domain; so far they've been unsuccessful in their attempt. But now Wired, one of the US's most comprehensive technology news magazines, have decided enough's enough and published the damning documents, which describe some "secret rooms" built deep inside the company's HQ in various capital cities around the US. You can access the documents, in full, through the Wired website before most US citizens have the chance to check them out (it's around 3 or 4am in the US as I type). Orwell can eat his heart out, this is the real thing.