Every Move You Make
Jun 21st, 2006 at 7:03 am by Susie
They’ll be watching you:
In interviews with Salon, the former AT&T workers said that only government officials or AT&T employees with top-secret security clearance are admitted to the room, located inside AT&T’s facility in Bridgeton. The room’s tight security includes a biometric “mantrap” or highly sophisticated double door, secured with retinal and fingerprint scanners. The former workers say company supervisors told them that employees working inside the room were “monitoring network traffic” and that the room was being used by “a government agency.”
The details provided by the two former workers about the Bridgeton room bear the distinctive earmarks of an operation run by the National Security Agency, according to two intelligence experts with extensive knowledge of the NSA and its operations. In addition to the room’s high-tech security, those intelligence experts told Salon, the exhaustive vetting process AT&T workers were put through before being granted top-secret security clearance points to the NSA, an agency known as much for its intense secrecy as its technological sophistication.
“It was very hush-hush,” said one of the former AT&T workers. “We were told there was going to be some government personnel working in that room. We were told, ‘Do not try to speak to them. Do not hamper their work. Do not impede anything that they’re doing.’”
The importance of the Bridgeton facility is its role in managing the “common backbone” for all of AT&T’s Internet operations. According to one of the former workers, Bridgeton serves as the technical command center from which the company manages all the routers and circuits carrying the company’s domestic and international Internet traffic. Therefore, Bridgeton could be instrumental for conducting surveillance or collecting data.
If the NSA is using the secret room, it would appear to bolster recent allegations that the agency has been conducting broad and possibly illegal domestic surveillance and data collection operations authorized by the Bush administration after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. AT&T’s Bridgeton location would give the NSA potential access to an enormous amount of Internet data — currently, the telecom giant controls approximately one-third of all bandwidth carrying Internet traffic to homes and businesses across the United States.
The “kicker” on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown last night was about the advent of robot sex, said to be only a few years in the future. And if that wasn’t disturbing enough, I just got a phone call that was intended for my answering machine!
I picked up the ringing phone and after a few seconds a female voice came out, saying: “I’m sorry to disturb you, but this call was intended to be answered only by an answering machine. Good bye.”
So, what have we here?
Is this a fishing expedition by potential burglars, who select as their targets those homes where a machine answers the phone?
Is it, perhaps, a pang of conscience on the part of the dialing machine, knowing its intended message — something like, “Be sure to vote Republican!” — would be met with laughter and scorn by any sapient being?
Or maybe it’s the harbinger of a revolution, where cheap, computerized machines band together to overthrow Mankind!
I hate to sound alarmist but, to my knowledge, my $20 AT&T answering machine has neither the will nor the ability to make a rational choice when presented with a verbal statement. That fact seems to preclude the caller actually wanting to converse with my answering machine, which is generally content to spent its life resting there on the table, sipping its few milliwatts of sustenance through a tiny wire. Unless …
Unless the cheerful voice that greeted me actually belonged to the Boys At Fort Meade, who have figured out a fiendish way of enlisting my innocuous machine’s help in order to spy on me — electronically.
Think of the “conversation” that takes place when one modem dials another. As humans, we hear a series of rather obnoxious yawps and squeals, which cease after the connection is established. But to the modems, those same noises are used to establish ground rules for the data transfer yet to come. Once the answering modem knows how to transfer data to and from the calling one, the two shut up and go about their business silently.
What if the NSA or some other nefarious outfit figured out a way to convert cheap answering machines into listening devices, simply by sending some secret, magical string of yawps and screeches that activate a hidden “feature” that wasn’t advertised in the Users Manual?
Voila! Big Brother is Listening!
Am I paranoid, or what?