From Wired: AT&T Sued Over NSA Eavesdropping

The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T on Tuesday, accusing the telecom company of violating federal laws by collaborating with the government’s secret, warrantless wiretapping of American citizens’ phone and internet usage.

The suit (.pdf), filed by the civil liberties group in federal court in San Francisco, alleges AT&T secretly gave the National Security Agency access to two massive databases that included both the contents of its subscribers’ communications and detailed transaction records, such as numbers dialed and internet addresses visited.

“Our goal is to go after the people who are making the government’s illegal surveillance possible,” says EFF attorney Kevin Bankston. “They could not do what they are doing without the help of companies like AT&T. We want to make it clear to AT&T that it is not in their legal or economic interests to violate the law whenever the president asks them to.”

One of AT&T’s databases, known as “Hawkeye,” contains 312 terabytes of data detailing nearly every telephone communication on AT&T’s domestic network since 2001, according to the complaint. The suit also alleges that AT&T allowed the NSA to use the company’s powerful Daytona database-management software to quickly search this and other communication databases.

This is a shociking reminder that Google is still a small fish in the big pond of information gathering, and explains why the government thought it could push them around. Being in league with AT&T, however, doesn’t bode well for our chances with net neutrality.

Another story to follow.