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 nature of the government operation using the Bridgeton room remains unknown, and could be legal. Aside from surveillance or data collection, the room could conceivably house a federal law enforcement operation, a classified research project, or some other unknown government operation.
The former workers, both of whom were approached by and spoke separately to Salon, asked to remain anonymous because they still work in the telecommunications industry. They both left the company in good standing. Neither worked inside the secured room or has access to classified information. One worked in AT&T's broadband division until 2003. The other asked to be identified only as a network technician, and worked at Bridgeton for about three years.
The disclosure of the room in Bridgeton follows assertions made earlier this year by a former AT&T worker in California, Mark Klein, who revealed that the company had installed a secret room in a San Francisco facility and reconfigured its circuits, allegedly to help collect data for use by the government. In detailed documents he provided to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Klein also alleged there were other secret rooms at AT&T facilities in other U.S. cities.
The Bush Administration has given a lot of lip service to toughness and steadfastness in the age of terror, stating that "they hate our freedom". Well, when a government in a free society utilizes private businesses to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans even when there is no suspcion of wrongdoing, it is the government, not the Americans, who have allowed the terrorists to win. It is the government that hates our freedom. It is the government that wants us to be afraid all the time, because only by playing on Americans' fears of being attacked again can Republicans continue to eviscerate the middle class, eliminate programs that help the poor, shovel ever-increasing amounts of taxpayer cash into the pockets of the already preposterously wealthy, sustain an ever-spiraling military machine, and embark on wars of choice.
Remember when Zacarias Moussaoui was "the 20th hijacker"? How many 20th hijackers have there been? I'd say it's about as many as there were Columbian druglords "responsible for 80% of the cocaine coming into this country" during the Reagan years: as many as was necessary to keep people afraid and keep them willing to sacrifice their civil liberties.
Now all of a sudden we have ANOTHER 20th hijacker in what is being sold as yet another Al Qaeda video. Isn't it funny how every time the Bush Administration is on the ropes, we hear about another terrorist threat they didn't tell us about, or another reminder of the 9/11 attacks? If you needed further proof that Rove has returned from exile, here it is. Whatever else we can say about Karl Rove, the man knows how to play to the reptilian brain.
It's ironic that the very people who support the bellicose rhetoric of this Administration and its bullying tactics, not just against Iraq, but against its own people, are the ones who are the most frightened of being attacked again. These so-called "patriots" are the ones who want to sell everything this country stands for down the river just so they can delude themselves that they are safe.
There's a word for this: It's called cowardice.
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