WASHINGTON — Under a decades-old program with the government, telecom giant AT&T in 2003 led the way on a new collection capability that the National Security Agency said amounted to a ” ‘live’ presence on the global Net” and would forward 400 billion Internet metadata records in one of its first months of operation, The New York Times reported in a story posted Saturday on its website.
The Fairview program was forwarding more than 1 million e-mails a day to the NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., the newspaper reported. Meanwhile, the separate Stormbrew program, linked to Verizon and the former company MCI, was still gearing up to use the new technology, which appeared to process foreign-to-foreign traffic.
In 2011, AT&T began handing over to the NSA 1.1 billion domestic cellphone calling records a day after “a push to get this flow operational prior to the 10th anniversary of 9/11,” according to an internal agency newsletter cited by The Times. Intelligence officials have told reporters in the past that, for technical reasons, the effort consisted mostly of landline phone records, the newspaper reported.
The NSA spent $188.9 million on the Fairview program, twice the amount spent on Stormbrew, its second-largest corporate program, the newspaper reported.
Such details from the decades-long partnership between the government and AT&T emerged from NSA documents provided by former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden, The Times reported. The Times and ProPublica jointly reviewed the documents, which date from 2003 to 2013.
The newspaper reported that while it has been long known that American telecommunications companies worked closely with the spy agency, the documents show that the government’s relationship with AT&T has been considered unique and especially productive. One document described it as “highly collaborative,” while another lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help,” the newspaper reported.
