Bill Lambrecht
September 5, 2015
S.A. a hub for Internet spying Documents show a long history here
WASHINGTON — Documents from fugitive former government contractor Edward Snowden spell out new details of AT&T’s cooperation with National Security Agency spying and an NSA operation with teams of elite hackers in San Antonio breaking into computers around the world.
NSA Texas hackers aimed at Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela and unspecified targets in the Middle East, documents showed. An offensive targeting Mexican leaders — called “WhiteTamale” — proved especially productive.
Documents from Snowden’s archive disclosed this month by the New York Times and Pro-Publica detailed AT&T’s involvement in NSA’s interception of email traffic at a time when AT&T made its headquarters in San Antonio. AT&T moved its corporate offices to Dallas in 2008.
Among those documents, a slide presentation shows San Antonio among the hubs of fiber-optic circuitry used in data interception under an NSA program called Fairview.
Together, the disclosures underscore San Antonio’s central role in intelligence gathering over the years.
The Snowden documents related to hacking started trickling out 20 months ago. They confirm one of the missions of NSA Texas in San Antonio — a growing role in Tailored Access Operations, the program of gathering intelligence by penetrating computers of foreign targets.
A slide presentation labeled top secret disclosed in December 2013 by Der Spiegel, the German news magazine, projected that in San Antonio, the operation known as TAO would expand from a staff of 57 in 2008 to 270 this year.
Documents describe TAO missions beyond hunting terrorists. The “WhiteTamale” offensive was directed at the former Mexican Public Security Secretariat, the federal ministry of the Mexican Executive Cabinet dissolved by President Enrique Peña Nieto in a 2013 reorganization.
Another document, an NSA memo from November 2010, tells how, in May of that year, TAO “successfully exploited” an email server to gain access in Mexico to then-President Felipe Calderón’s public email account. The intrusion was first made public by Der Spiegel.
The memo said the domain penetrated “contained diplomatic, economic and leadership communications which continue to provide insights into Mexico’s political system and internal stability.”
“Your data is our data, your equipment is our equipment — any time, any place by any legal means,” was an NSA motto noted in a 2006 internal newsletter, another of the documents taken by Snowden and revealed earlier this year by the German magazine.
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