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Salon has a report that AT&T has a hush-hush facility in St. Louis.

In a pivotal network operations center in metropolitan St. Louis, AT&T has maintained a secret, highly secured room since 2002 where government work is being conducted, according to two former AT&T workers once employed at the center.

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.

[...]

Since last December, news reports have asserted that the NSA has conducted warrantless spying on the phone and e-mail communications of thousands of people inside the U.S., and has been secretly collecting the phone call records of millions of Americans, using data provided by major telecommunications companies, including AT&T. Such operations would represent a fundamental shift in the NSA's secretive mission, which over the last three decades is widely understood to have focused exclusively on collecting signals intelligence from abroad.

The reported operations have sparked fierce protest by lawmakers and civil liberties advocates, and have raised fundamental questions about the legality of Bush administration policies, including their consequences for the privacy rights of Americans. The Bush administration has acknowledged the use of domestic surveillance operations since Sept. 11, 2001, but maintains they are conducted within the legal authority of the presidency. Several cases challenging the legality of the alleged spying operations are now pending in federal court, including suits against the federal government, and AT&T, among other telecom companies.

In a statement provided to Salon, AT&T spokesman Walt Sharp said: "If and when AT&T is asked by government agencies for help, we do so strictly within the law and under the most stringent conditions. Beyond that, we can't comment on matters of national security."

I remember seeing a piece of junk mail from AT&T. It was a customer service survey, and on the envelope it said, "We're listening." No kidding.

Actually, this isn't really a surprise. I'm not a conspiracy theory TFH kind of person, but I've always suspected that some agency in some super-secret way has been attempting to monitor the traffic on the Internet, and I suspect that it goes farther back than the USA PATRIOT Act or 9/11. It probably goes back to the beginnings of the Internet itself; after all, it was originally created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to link military computer networks, so naturally you'd expect the military would have developed a way to monitor what goes on in cyberspace. Enlisting Ma Bell would make sense; who else but the company that has a monopoly on all the telephone lines in the country? Virtually all internet traffic travels at some point over AT&T.

As for what they're looking for, well, you can come to your own conclusions. Perhaps, like the NSA mining all the phone numbers in the country, they're looking for patterns that lead to terrorists, or they're monitoring anti-government sentiment in e-mails and web postings. (Bob is convinced that the Justice Department has a file somewhere chronicling the rants of Bark Bark Woof Woof. My response: "Really? Cool. That boosts my readership by one.")

(Meanwhile, the AP reports that local police agencies are finding their own way to do some warrantless snooping.)

Frankly, I'm not too worried; if the NSA can't track down the Nigerian bank scammers, I'm not too worried about them coming after me.