Watch what you say on the Internet!

Big brother is Watching!!! (Via Feministe & Pandagon):

When former AT&T technician Mark Klein learned of a secret

room installed in the company's San Francisco internet

switching center, he was certain he had stumbled onto the Total

Information Awareness program, a Defense Department
research project that intended to scour databases across

the country for telltale signs of terrorists.

Here is the full text of the AT&T whistleblower's testimony regarding Secret Rooms in AT&T buildings used to spy on internet messages.

The whistleblower's testimony is based mostly on wiring documents, and also the hardware in the room. One machine called a Narus, is apparently specifically designed to snoop on internet traffic (apparently very popular in the corporate world):

"Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network),

we can record," says Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president

of Narus, a Mountain View, California, company. "We can reconstruct

all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they

clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol)
calls."

Sooooo why does AT&T need to reroute all their cable through a cabinet, and then into another rooom where one of these machine's resides? And why would no one but NSA cleared staff have access to this room.

I'm a little scared right now. I mean, the phone number storing, fine, but being able to track everything everyone says or looks at on the internet, that is, in my opinion, a clear invasion of privacy. They are indiscriminantly collecting information on individuals without a warrant or any kind of due process and without their knowledge. That has to be at least 2 laws that we are breaking, right?

Which hopefully means that none of the information they collect in this endeavor could be used against an American citizen in a criminal case because it is collected outside the protetcions provided to us. So, what again is the purpose of this program? Besides snooping in a serious way.