One of the largest telecommunication companies of USA, AT&T has had an "excellent, decades-long" relationship with the National Security Agency (NSA), it said on Saturday.
Citing newly released NSA documents dating from 2003 to 2013, the New York Times reported that AT&T is characterized by service data collector as "extremely cooperative" with a "great willingness to help" with government surveillance of the Internet.
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."
With the Fairview program they also began collecting “more than a million messages the day with 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.