One of the largest US telecommunications companies, AT&T has an “excellent cooperation for decades” relationship with the National Security Agency (NSA) as published on Saturday.
Citing recently released NSA documents dating from 2003 to 2013, the New York Times reported that AT&T was characterized by the data collection agency as "extremely cooperative" with a "great willingness to assist" in government surveillance of the Internet.network.
In June of 2013, Edward Snowden leaked thousands of documents to the media. New leaks show that AT&T has given the NSA access to "billions of emails that have passed through its home networks," the Times reported.
The report also said that AT&T also provided "technical assistance" for "intercepting telephone communications of all United Nations Internet communications."
The documents also show that the NSA's budget for its relationship with AT&T was double that it used for other companies, as AT&T provided 17 nodes on the US Internet for surveillance.
The Times also reports that the new documents do not name AT&T, but that analysis by its journalists revealed "enough evidence to show the company."
According to leaked documents, within the first few months of the NSA-AT&T partnership, the service gained access to "400 billion metadata files."
The Fairview program also began collecting "more than a million messages a day using the keyword selection system" at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade.
By 2011, AT&T delivered “over 1,1 billion domestic mobile calls,” just months before the tenth anniversary of attacks of September 11. By 2013, the program was “processing 60 million messages a day sent by strangers to strangers.”
"It is a partnership and not a contractual relationship," said one of the documents, which referred to AT&T's relationship with the NSA, indicating that it was highly cooperative rather than mandatory.
