Does the NSA Tap That? What We Still Don't Know About Internet Surveillance

Among the snooping revelations of recent weeks, there have been tantalizing bits of evidence that the NSA is tapping fiber-optic cables that carry nearly all international phone and Internet data.

The idea that the NSA is sweeping up vast data streams via cables and other infrastructure — often described as the "backbone of the Internet" — is not new. In late 2005, the New York Times first described the tapping, which began after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. More details emerged in early 2006 when an AT&T whistleblower came forward.

But like other aspects of NSA surveillance, virtually everything about this kind of NSA surveillance is highly secret and we're left with far from a full picture.

Is the NSA really sucking up everything?

It's not clear.

The most detailed, though now dated, information on the topic comes from Mark Klein. He's the former AT&T technician who went public in 2006 describing the installation in 2002-03 of a secret room in an AT&T building in San Francisco. The equipment, detailed in technical documents, allowed the NSA to conduct what Klein described as "vacuum-cleaner surveillance of all the data crossing the internet -- whether that be peoples' e-mail, web surfing or any other data."

Klein said he was told there was similar equipment installed at AT&T facilities in San Diego, Seattle, and San Jose.

There is also evidence that the vacuuming has continued in some form right up to the present.

A draft NSA inspector's general report from 2009, recently published by the Washington Post,refers to access via two companies "to large volumes of foreign-to-foreign communications transiting the United States through fiberoptic cables, gateway switches, and data networks."

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.