AT&T Accidentally Leaks NSA Suit Information 274
op12 writes "CNET has an article describing how AT&T accidentally leaked sensitive information involving the NSA lawsuit. From the article: '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. But the obscured text nevertheless can be copied and pasted inside some PDF readers, including Preview under Apple'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. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the class action lawsuit in January, alleges that room is used by an unlawful National Security Agency surveillance program.""
Here's why _you_ should dismiss the case... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, but with this administration, it's hard not to assume some underhanded strong-armin^^^^^ persuasion.
Proactive protection... (Score:5, Insightful)
benign reasons why AT&T would allegedly have a secret room at its downtown San Francisco switching center
then why did...
the Bush administration [submit] a 29-page brief that elaborates on its argument that the case should be tossed out of court because of the "state secrets" privilege?
Seems like if they didn't do anything illegal they have nothing to fear.
What's amazing is (Score:5, Insightful)
When will they learn? (Score:4, Insightful)
If it's not people who don't really understand how postscript works, it's people who don't realise those 4MB word files contain more than just the visible part of the document....
Re:Here's why _you_ should dismiss the case... (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyhow, here's an unredacted excerpt:
In January 2003, I, along with others, toured the AT&T central office on Folsom Street in San Francisco -- actually three floors of an SBC building. There I saw a new room being built adjacent to the 4ESS switch room where the public's phone calls are routed. I learned that the person whom the NSA interviewed for the secret job was the person working to install equipment in this room. The regular technician work force was not allowed in the room.
Dumb and dumber.... (Score:5, Insightful)
In addition, do these people not employ any security experts that tell them how to do this right? Making clean (text) documents is really easy: Export to ASCII, remove text, import as ASCII. But obviously this low-tech approach needs a qualified high wizard of computing today.
Not that I mind that these amoral scum got bitten.
Why are they suing AT&T? (Score:5, Insightful)
Suing AT&T really misses the point...
Re:Dumb and dumber.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest problem is that it's a paradigm shift for these people and they're not ready for it. The "Black Bars" always worked with regular documents, but when they were forced (against their will) to switch to electronic documents many people tried to find ways to make all of their old procedures work with the new format. This always happens when you force people to switch to technologies they're not comfortable with, and throughout history has been an enormous source of lost productivity and security leaks. The kind of people who are making these mistakes aren't the kind of people who read Slashdot, they're the ones that are thankful when they can finally go home every night and get away from those godforsaken computers for the rest of the day.
Re:Dumb and dumber.... (Score:5, Insightful)
But did they? I mean, if I wanted to sow disinformation, hiding something with the intent it might be found is a great way to it.
(/me double checks tinfoil hat... and peeks outside for black helicopters)
Re:What's amazing is (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why are they suing AT&T? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it tells companies that the government isn't the only one they should fear.
Re:Dumb and dumber.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What's amazing is (Score:5, Insightful)
We geeks deal with data every day. We understand that patterns can be drawn from it, often very incorrect patterns based off of incomplete data.
The non-geeks cannot comprehend that in the next very few short years, they will get a knock on the door, and the police will say, On Thursday, at 8am, you shopped at the grocery store on 10th street, bought a bunch of bannana's and some milk. 20 minutes later, you were seen driving buy at 3MPH over the speed-limit on this street, which is only 5 minutes from the grocery store. You had better account for exactly what you did during that 15 minutes, because we are placing you under arrest for a crime that was commited in that area at that time. We also see that you have called your nephew 3 times in the last month, who was served 6 months (several years ago) in jail for an assault. And you give money to the ACLU, which makes our job harder.
Re:This "leak" is intentional. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:text (Score:1, Insightful)
http://cryptome.org/klein-decl.htm [cryptome.org]
It's not this admin, liberal JFK spied on ML King (Score:2, Insightful)
Excuse me, *this* administration. You lost quite a bit of credibility on that one. *Any* administration can do such things. Read up on President John F Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy's surveilance of Martin Luther King.
Re:What's amazing is (Score:5, Insightful)
The US government must think that Americans are lazy, brainless sheep who will shut out even the most obvious evidence that criminals are running the country. I mean seriously, only the most idiotic... Oh look! American Idol is on!
Stupid EFF (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Here's why _you_ should dismiss the case... (Score:2, Insightful)
That's an interesting* assertion that I see no proof of in the linked article. And of course, it rests what feeble attempts at proof on (a) complete guesswork and (b) the assumption that phonetapping is the only factor in identifying terrists. That entire article is a complete nonsequiter.
*by 'interesting' I mean 'stupid'
Re:Why are they suing AT&T? (Score:5, Insightful)
Under settled principles of sovereign immunity, the United States, as sovereign, is immune from suit, save as it consents to be sued. United States v. Dalm, 494 U.S. 596, 608 (1990) [findlaw.com] (internal quotes omitted). A necessary corollary of this rule is that when Congress attaches conditions to legislation waiving the sovereign immunity of the United States, those conditions must be strictly observed, and exceptions thereto are not to be lightly implied. Block v. North Dakota, 461 U.S. 273, 287 (1983) [findlaw.com].
Point me to a statute that explicitly recognizes the right of a private citizen to bring suit against the NSA for this kind of thing, and then we'll continue the discussion. (The Fourth Amendment [cornell.edu] might be used, in conjunction with Article III section 2 [cornell.edu] and 28 U.S.C. 1331 [cornell.edu] or 28 U.S.C. 1346 [cornell.edu](a)(2), but there's a tricky issue of standing to be resolved. Without at least some evidence of the NSA spying on the plaintiff individually, there's no way to support a claim of actual injury, and the case will be dismissed on a Rule 12(b)(6) [cornell.edu] motion.)
Actual Contents of Secret Room (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's not this admin, liberal JFK spied on ML Ki (Score:4, Insightful)
Excuse me, *Kennedy*. You lost quite a bit of credibility on that one. Read up on FISA and specifically what year it was enacted.
Don't need anything special. (Score:3, Insightful)
Also works with the normal Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0 for Windows. No DMCA mumbo-jumbo... whoever did it just had no idea what they were doing.
Re:Here's why _you_ should dismiss the case... (Score:2, Insightful)
So, while I agree with you to some extent, I still have to think that these call records will not produce a lot of results against the targets we are most concerned about. I agree with you that the idea of tracking people who want to impeach Bush is ridiculous... but did you see the article about reporter phone records being used to find leaks [slashdot.org]? I think social networking would work much better for that task, where the people probably weren't trying as hard to cover their tracks, which is along the lines of what the previous poster was suggesting.
NSA itself isn't really the problem. (Score:4, Insightful)
The problems come in when required legal processes are ignored by the powers that be.
I feel ashamed to have worked under that agency for a couple of years. What is going on here is against the very mantra they preach to you regarding the performance of your duties. Violating the laws against collection on US Citizens used to be about on the same level as screwing a horse. Now it seems to be quite acceptable, at least by the upper echelon of management.
Re:Here's why _you_ should dismiss the case... (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems to me like there is already too much fragmentation going on. They need to be able to pass info to the people that can make a difference. As long as they can't do that then they've no business collecting even more information which will be mishandled even further.
I know what you saying, break the info apart but what if a seedy character had my phone number before me? Does that mean I'm under surveillance and instantly labeled a terrorist? This doesn't work because the information obtained is ineffective. If they suspect someone in particular then they can tap that individual line. If they suspect 20 people surrounding it are involved then yes indeed they can be tapped as well, that is reasonable and probable cause. Doing this to every phone is pointless and a huge waste of resources which could be devoted to analyzing the data they already have and then notifying the people that will make a difference. If you're going to change the law for the NSA make it so they can legally pass the info on to the FBI and local law enforcement. That is all that is required and far less invasive.