AT&T leaks sensitive info in NSA suit | CNET News.com

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AT&T leaks sensitive info in NSA suit

By Declan McCullagh
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: May 26, 2006, 9:39 AM PDT
Last modified: May 26, 2006, 3:35 PM PDT
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Lawyers for AT&T accidentally released sensitive information while  
defending a lawsuit that accuses the company of facilitating a  
government wiretapping program, CNET News.com has learned.

AT&T's attorneys this week filed a 25-page legal brief striped with  
thick black lines that were intended to obscure portions of three  
pages and render them unreadable (click here for PDF).

But the obscured text nevertheless can be copied and pasted inside  
some PDF readers, including Preview under Apple Computer's OS X and  
the xpdf utility used with X11.


Credit: Declan McCullagh/CNET News.com
A room in this AT&T switching
center in downtown San Francisco
at 611 Folsom St. is alleged to
be a place where the National
Security Agency taps Internet and
telephone communications. AT&T
has neither confirmed nor denied
these allegations, which surfaced
in a lawsuit filed by the
Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The deleted portions of the legal brief seek to offer benign reasons  
why AT&T would allegedly have a secret room at its downtown San  
Francisco switching center that would be designed to monitor Internet  
and telephone traffic. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which  
filed the class-action lawsuit in January, alleges that the room is  
used by an unlawful National Security Agency surveillance program.

"AT&T notes that the facts recited by plaintiffs are entirely  
consistent with any number of legitimate Internet monitoring systems,  
such as those used to detect viruses and stop hackers," the redacted  
pages say.

Another section says: "Although the plaintiffs ominously refer to the  
equipment as the 'Surveillance Configuration,' the same physical  
equipment could be utilized exclusively for other surveillance in  
full compliance with" the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The redacted portions of AT&T's court filing are not classified, and  
no information relating to actual operations of an NSA surveillance  
program was disclosed. Also, AT&T's attorneys at the law firms of  
Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman and Sidley Austin were careful not to  
explicitly acknowledge that such a secret room actually exists.

A representative for AT&T was not immediately available to comment.

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Although EFF's lawsuit was filed before allegations about the room  
surfaced, reports of its existence have become central to the  
nonprofit group's attempts to prove AT&T opened its network to the  
NSA. A former AT&T employee, Mark Klein, has released documents  
alleging the company spliced its fiber optic cables and ran a  
duplicate set of cables to Room 641A at its 611 Folsom Street building.

This is hardly the first time that PDF files have leaked embarrassing  
or sensitive information. In an ironic twist, the NSA published a 13- 
page paper in January describing how redactions could be done securely.

A similar problem has arisen with metadata associated with Microsoft  
Office files. In March 2004, a gaffe by the SCO Group revealed which  
companies it had considered targeting in its legal campaign against  
Linux users. Microsoft Office 2003/XP even offers a way to  
"permanently remove hidden data and collaboration data" from Word,  
Excel and PowerPoint files.

Documents that EFF filed, including a redacted version (click here  
for PDF) of a sworn statement by Klein released this week, were  
properly redacted. Instead of including the underlying text and  
layering a black rectangle on top, the San Francisco-based civil  
liberties group saved those pages as image files.

EFF did experience its own blunder earlier in the case, though, in  
which it accidentally placed sealed documents on the court's public  
Web site. They were visible for about an hour--a situation that U.S.  
District Judge Vaughn Walker dubbed "a mishap" during a hearing last  
week.

'State secrets' invoked
Also this week, the Bush administration submitted a 29-page brief  
that elaborates on its argument that the case should be tossed out of  
court because of the "state secrets" privilege.

Lawyers for the Justice Department have offered to fly a courier from  
Washington to San Francisco with classified documents that Walker  
could review in private--documents that, in the eyes of the  
government, will convince him to dismiss the lawsuit. (The Bush  
administration also argues that EFF lawyers should not be permitted  
to see the classified information.)

"No aspect of this case can be litigated without disclosing state  
secrets," the government said in its brief this week. "The United  
States has not lightly invoked the state secrets privilege, and the  
weighty reasons for asserting the privilege are apparent from the  
classified material submitted in support of its assertion."

It also pointed to a May 12 ruling from a federal judge in Virginia  
who dismissed a case against Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen of  
Lebanese descent. (El-Masri had claimed to have been abducted and  
tortured by the CIA in an "extraordinary rendition.")

The Bush administration said the case must be dismissed on "state  
secrets" grounds, and U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis reluctantly  
agreed. Ellis wrote that "any answer to the complaint by the  
defendants risks the disclosure of specific details about the  
rendition argument."

In addition, Wired News filed a brief written by Tim Alger at Quinn  
Emanuel asking Walker to unseal Klein's formal declaration. (Wired  
News has published other documents that Klein has written.)

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 15 comments
Post a comment
TalkBack

No Such Agency Says There Is No Such Room
CancerMan2
May 27, 2006, 9:42 AM PDT
You can listen to the "redacted" text
cacondor
May 26, 2006, 10:49 PM PDT
The old story
heystoopid
May 26, 2006, 10:32 PM PDT
If the room doesn't exist, why is the Bush
wtortorici
May 26, 2006, 7:50 PM PDT
Where is the original document? PDF Link?
reecewilson
May 26, 2006, 5:19 PM PDT
Wire Tapping ...
Ian Gumby
May 26, 2006, 11:44 AM PDT
Why?
ScullyB
May 26, 2006, 11:40 AM PDT
lawyers can do it confidentially
marileev
May 26, 2006, 11:01 AM PDT
at&t
saturnine01
May 26, 2006, 10:53 AM PDT
Microsoft offers redaction add-in
Charles Upsdell
May 26, 2006, 10:10 AM PDT
 Read more comments >




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