AT&T Buildings Around US Reportedly Used as Part of NSA Spying

While this is not new news, these sort of things do warrant reminding of every once in a while to keep it fresh in the new generation's minds. I worked for a few ISP's late nineties/early 2000's. I distinctly remember the day the image of the closet door was received by us all, indicating the first direct wire tap of the backbone fiber near MAE East. After that most of us tech support types tried diligently to inform the public, and even found ways to route around MAE East. No one believed, and very few cared to learn about their routing. These days it's nearly impossible to find a clean unenveloped route.

Folks, it's never been rumor. No, not every packet you send is recorded. But the US government's systems are always decades ahead of any pattern matching tech you think you've seen, and those rule sets and capture filters are almost certainly run on all your traffic. Being a joint enterprise of public/private entities, that shadow version of you exists for the involved groups and governments to review, analyze, and run tests against.

If you use systems that ask your personal preferences, collect personal information, or collect your location data: lie absurdly to it constantly. Being random about it gets your more diverse advertisements, and being more specific about it across platforms makes it easy to spot when something is trying to advertise on the sly, or when your info gets somewhere it shouldn't have.

You can't stop the NSA finding out stuff about you, if they want it, they'll get it. But why make it easy on any of the fuckers? If they want to sniff your business, let them smell the whole asshole.

This is not news. This article was published in (2018). There has been publicly available evidence of NSA wiretaps since 2006 [1] and rumors of such activity extend back to the 1980s.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A