The rumors began about two years ago, almost as soon as the mysterious room was built inside a nondescript brick building in Bridgeton, a nerve center for AT&T’s Internet operations.
Before the remodeling started, the area had plenty of windows; it housed operations for WorldNet, an Internet-service provider that keeps millions of people online. It was once a call center, where employees helped customers who were having computer trouble, says Earline Jones, president of Communications Workers of America Local 6377. But in 2002 the windows were closed off. A door with no knobs became an entryway that no one used—at least when anyone was watching. A sign at the door warned, “No Admittance.”
“From the outside, it’s just a wall—I don’t know how they get in and out,” Jones says. She says she often sees the mysterious doorway when she’s inside the building on union business and first heard speculation around the time that AT&T laid off nearly 120 employees and began building the room. “It’s been rumored there’s a government operation going on in there,” she says. “I really don’t know what goes on in there.”
Conspiracy theorists think they do know, and plenty of others want to find out for sure. This isn’t a matter of whether UFOs exist or who shot JFK. According to published reports and internal AT&T documents, this room in Bridgeton could be ground zero in the federal government’s electronic-espionage effort, aimed, ostensibly, at al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
Neither AT&T nor the federal government is talking about the secret room or accusations that the company has illegally given government spies information about millions of ordinary Americans. Scores of states and private entities have sued AT&T and other telecommunication conglomerates, alleging that the companies have countenanced illegal spying. In most cases, the federal government has intervened, saying that neither the companies nor the government can confirm or deny allegations without compromising national security.
That the National Security Agency would be involved in controversial spy missions isn’t surprising. Neither is the uproar among privacy advocates, state regulators and the ACLU.
What nobody expected is the central role St. Louis is playing in a nationwide drama over Big Brother and international terrorism.
The online magazine Salon.com broke the story in June.
Quoting two unnamed AT&T ex-employees who claimed to have seen the bowels of the operation, Salon’s report described a 20-by-40-foot room more appropriate for a Tom Clancy spy thriller than a ho-hum building at the Interstate 270–Interstate 70 interchange.
According to the report, just beyond the steel doors with no handles, there’s a so-called mantrap, where fingerprints and retinas are scanned to determine whether a visitor will make it past an opaque material similar to Plexiglas—one expert told Salon that the material is likely infused with Kevlar to make it impervious to bullets, just as high-security areas are protected inside NSA headquarters in Washington, D.C. Even plastic explosives would pose no threat.
Months before Salon broke the story, Bridgeton’s role in alleged domestic espionage surfaced in a California lawsuit filed in January by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting free speech and privacy on the Internet. Filed one month after The New York Times first exposed questionable espionage by the NSA, the federal lawsuit against AT&T accuses the corporation of illegally violating privacy by allowing the NSA unfettered access to telephone calls, e-mails and records of all Internet activity by millions of Americans without a court order.
The plaintiffs have a powerful ally in Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician who says he knew what was going on and thought that it was wrong. In public statements, he has used such terms as “vacuum-cleaner surveillance” and “Orwellian” to describe the spying he says was enabled by AT&T.
As an employee who helped wire alleged surveillance gear, Klein had a firsthand look inside a secret room in an AT&T building in San Francisco, where, he says, the company set up equipment that split fiberoptic signals traveling between computers and telephones. A slice of signals transmitted on AT&T’s telephone and Internet networks was delivered to the NSA, which reportedly used special spy software to sift through the data and determine who merited more scrutiny. Unusual Web-surfing habits, words considered red flags in e-mails, communication with people considered suspicious—the government’s software uses all of this to determine who should be investigated further.
Klein had more than his eyewitness accounts and recollections of conversations with other technicians who, he says, told him that AT&T has set up secret rooms in several cities around the nation. He also gave the plaintiffs a document suggesting that Bridgeton is a key link in a nationwide electronic spy network.
The document, dated January 13, 2003, stated that work orders to account for time spent installing signal splitters would be issued from AT&T’s network-operations center in Bridgeton. Furthermore, the document stated that personnel in Bridgeton would coordinate the work. According to an expert retained by the plaintiffs, the spy gear was installed, quite literally, in the dead of night, at 2 a.m., when Internet use is at its lowest and the risk of traffic disruption minimal.
J. Scott Marcus, the plaintiffs’ expert, knows the Internet to its core. In the private sector, he headed a team of GTE engineers who turned 13,000 miles of unused fiberoptic cables into a high-speed Internet system. He subsequently became the Federal Communication Commission’s top expert on the Internet. As a member of the FCC’s Homeland Security Policy Council, he held a top-security clearance and helped write regulations that would keep the Internet configured in ways that allowed law enforcement to eavesdrop on suspected criminals, pursuant to court orders. Marcus said that the system described in documents provided by Klein didn’t limit itself to surveillance directed at individuals, as would be expected when judges issue wiretapping warrants. Nor was it confined to south Florida, northern Virginia, Silicon Valley or New York, where most Internet transmissions from overseas enter the United States.
“This deployment ... is neither modest nor limited, and it apparently involves considerably more locations than would be required to catch the majority of international traffic,” Marcus stated in a court declaration filed last spring.
Marcus didn’t need to be an economist to know that more than profit and loss was involved here. A quick glance at the stock market sufficed.
The system Klein exposed was superexpensive, and, according to Marcus, there was no commercial justification for it. In short, this wasn’t a likely investment for a company faltering on Wall Street, a company with financial woes that would eventually lead to its acquisition by SBC. Although AT&T began offering its business customers Internet-security services that could utilize signal splitters in 2004, that was more than a year after the memo was issued describing Bridgeton’s role in coordinating work. Marcus opines that AT&T likely was trying to find a commercial use for a spy system that was already up and running.
“In sum, I can think of no business rationale in terms of AT&T’s own business needs that would likely have justified an investment of this magnitude, nor any combination of rationales,” Marcus says. “I consider it highly probable that this deployment was externally funded, and I consider the U.S. government to be the most obvious funding source.”
But why St. Louis? Look at a map.
Lying on the bank of the Mississippi River and nearly equidistant from Mexico and Canada, St. Louis is the perfect epicenter for communications in the United States.
In the 19th century, St. Louis was a crossroads through which telegraph signals flowed. During the 1880s, Western Union employed more telegraph operators in St. Louis than in Chicago. Even today, St. Louis remains a key vertebra in AT&T’s high-speed–Internet backbone, which carries an estimated 20 percent of all Internet signals in the United States. In the trade press, St. Louis was mentioned in the same breath as New York, San Francisco, Boston and Los Angeles when AT&T upgraded its system in 2001 to create one of the world’s biggest and fastest Internet pipelines. High-tech companies as far away as India have used St. Louis as a selling point. “The city of St. Louis is at a central strategic location in the United States which is safe from wars, earthquakes and hurricanes,” boasts the website of a New Delhi web-hosting firm with servers in St. Louis. “St. Louis’ central location makes it an ideal place to distribute Internet data throughout the United States and all over the world.”
The modest brick building in Bridgeton that is reportedly a center of spying once belonged to Western Union, which sold it to AT&T in 1990 as part of a deal to unload the telegraph company’s electronic-messaging business before most people knew what e-mail was. Back then, the Bridgeton building was headquarters for a worldwide computerized communications system that spanned 20 countries and employed 1,500 people.
Steven M. Bellovin, a Columbia University computer-science professor who once worked for AT&T, explains that inertia counts in the Internet age.
“Why St. Louis?” says the professor, who’s considered a leading expert on Internet security. “Well, why not? It’s centrally located, which helps. There are several bridges over the Mississippi, which also helps—you can carry fibers on the bridge. It is, or at least was, a major railroad hub for similar reasons, and the early communications network—the telegraph—ran along railroad rights of way. You tend to put new communications facilities where old ones were because you don’t upgrade things all at once: You put in new gear to terminate old lines, and you bring in new lines to connect to existing gear.”
Allegations that AT&T has allowed illegal spying have prompted more than a dozen lawsuits around the nation. Two legal actions have been filed against the company in Missouri.
“The wrong is that Missouri law appears to prohibit the disclosure of certain information in telegraph and telephone communications without the consent of the parties or without a court order,” says attorney Joseph Dulle (pronounced “Dooley”), who has filed a class-action lawsuit in St. Louis Circuit Court on behalf of consumers whose privacy has allegedly been compromised. The lead plaintiff in the case is Claudia Mink, development director for Union Avenue Opera. Mink has long been associated with the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri as a member and a volunteer, assisting with fundraising and day-to-day office work.
In this and other similar cases, AT&T has consistently refused to confirm or deny that it provided information to the government. Reached by e-mail, a company spokesman wouldn’t answer questions about alleged data mining in Bridgeton or whether his employer, absent court orders, has given the NSA access to data generated by Internet and telephone users. “AT&T is fully committed to protecting our customers’ privacy,” spokesman Larry Solomon wrote, ducking specifics. “We do not comment on matters of national security.”
Two members of the Missouri Public Service Commission, which regulates telecommunication companies, have also gone to court.
In July, AT&T ignored subpoenas from commissioners Steve Gaw and Robert Clayton, who demanded that company executives testify and produce documents that would either confirm or disprove media reports that AT&T has enabled the government to spy on Americans. Gaw and Clayton then asked a Cole County judge to enforce their subpoenas. Before a hearing could be held, the U.S. Department of Justice sued the commissioners and AT&T in federal court, saying that the commissioners’ questions couldn’t be answered without causing “exceptionally grave harm to national security.”
With mixed results, the federal government has responded in similar fashion elsewhere. Scores of state regulators and private entities have sued telecommunication companies, alleging illegal spying in concert with the NSA. In Illinois (where author Studs Terkel was a plaintiff) and New Jersey, the government has successfully stymied inquiries by arguing that either confirming or denying the existence of a spy program would threaten national security.
In the California suit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the federal government has not been able to block the proceedings. Even though entire paragraphs of exhibits in the case were blacked out, as were parts of written declarations by witnesses, the judge in the case has ruled that this kind of spying is hardly a secret.
“It might appear that none of the subject matter in this litigation could be considered a secret given that the alleged surveillance programs have been so widely reported in the media,” Judge Vaughn Walker ruled in July as he denied a government motion to dismiss the case. “AT&T and the government have, for all practical purposes, already disclosed that AT&T assists the government in monitoring communication content.” Any terrorist, the judge surmised, would anticipate the type of spying alleged in the lawsuit. In addition, the judge noted, President George W. Bush has acknowledged eavesdropping on terrorist suspects without court authorization, albeit when one of the parties is outside the borders of the United States.
“The compromise between liberty and security remains a difficult one,” the judge ruled. “But dismissing this case at the outset would sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security.”
The following month in Detroit, U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor made the first ruling on the legality of the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program, calling it unconstitutional and insisting that it be halted. “There are no hereditary kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution,” she wrote.
The Bush administration appealed the decision immediately, arguing that the program was well within the president’s authority but that proving it would require revealing state secrets.
Here in Missouri, Gaw and Clayton insist that they’re not imperiling national security by asking AT&T to disclose its role. They point out that they’re not even asking for specifics, such as what information was mined or from whom or where data went after it was lifted from AT&T facilities or how it was used. They merely want the company to reveal whether it followed state privacy laws.
“This is our legal and moral obligation,” Clayton says. “We don’t know whether they’re following the law or not. Prove to us that you have abided by Missouri law or, in the alternative, show us the federal law that resolves us of our obligation.”
The Public Service Commission has the power to regulate telephone services but not the Internet. However, in light of technology that allows telephone calls to be transmitted over the Internet, Gaw says commissioners may have legal standing to inquire about data that might have been mined from AT&T’s Internet operation in Bridgeton. “I think that’s a legitimate question,” he says.
For Gaw and Clayton, this situation is a simple matter of law. “Commissioner Clayton and I feel very strongly about ensuring our rules are followed,” Gaw says. “There’s no broad inquiry here. Laws need to be enforced, period.”
State law gives commissioners the right to demand answers as individuals, and the other three members of the commission have stayed out of the dispute. At least one commissioner, chairman Jeff Davis, says this is a matter of national security and that Clayton and Gaw, both Democrats, are engaging in partisan politics.
Not so, says Gaw, former speaker of the Missouri House of Representatives, who was appointed to the commission by former Gov. Bob Holden.
“I’d be pursuing this regardless of whether the administration was Republican or Democratic,” Gaw says. “If we don’t step up to the plate, no one else will.” With the full power of AT&T and the federal government against them, Gaw acknowledges that he and Clayton are facing Goliath.
“I suppose David could put down his stones and slingshot and go home,” Gaw says with a slight chuckle, “but we’re not prepared to do that.”
