[privacy] AT&T Accidently Leaks Sensitive Info in NSA Suit

["Fergie" <fergdawg () netzero net>]

Via C|Net News.

[snip]

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.

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

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 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.

[snip]

More here:
http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-6077353.html

- ferg


--
"Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
 Engineering Architecture for the Internet
 fergdawg () netzero net or fergdawg () sbcglobal net
 ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/

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