March 29, 2006: Expert Witness Says NSA Would Have Placed Signal ‘Splitters’ Differently if It Only Intended to Monitor International Communications

Expert witness J. Scott Marcus, in an analysis submitted on behalf of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit against AT&T (see January 31, 2006), notes that if the NSA had wanted to intercept only international electronic communications in its surveillance operations facilited by AT&T (see January 16, 2004), it would have placed “splitters” only at entry points such as ocean cable-head stations rather than in AT&T offices (see October 2003) in locations such as Atlanta and San Francisco (see Late 2003), where they would inevitably pick up huge amounts of domestic communications. Marcus, a former AT&T employee who held a top secret clearance when he was a consultant for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), writes: “The majority of international IP [Internet Protocol] traffic enters the United States at a limited number of locations, many of them in the areas of northern Virginia, Silicon Valley, New York, and (for Latin America) south Florida. This deployment, however, is neither modest nor limited, and it apparently involves considerably more locations that would be required to catch the majority of international traffic.” (Emphasis in original.) Marcus continues: “I conclude that the designers of the SG3 Configuration (see Late 2003) made no attempt, in terms of the location or position of the fiber split, to exclude data sources primarily comprised of domestic data.… Once the data has been diverted, there is nothing in the data that reliably and unambiguously distinguishes whether the destination is domestic or foreign.” Marcus estimates that the NSA has 15 to 20 sites in AT&T facilities around the country, and says, “a substantial fraction, probably well over half, of AT&T’s purely domestic traffic was diverted.” Former senior AT&T technician Mark Klein (see July 7, 2009 and May 2004) will later write, “Though Marcus refrained from drawing the obvious conclusion, the facts strongly suggest that this entire apparatus was designed for domestic spying.” (Emphasis in original). [Klein, 2009, pp. 49-50, 71] Klein will also write that Marcus’s expertise “was at a much higher level than mine.” Klein will later write that he is pleased that Marcus’s statement validates and supports his own documentation and conclusions. [Klein, 2009, pp. 71]