AT&T is being called a “highly collaborative” partner of the NSA, and showed the government agency an “extreme willingness to help” spy on Americans, suggests a new report published by the New York Times.
The Times based its report on documents supplied by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who first revealed the government’s mass-scale spying efforts two years ago. AT&T has allowed the government to snoop on its customers for well more than a decade. It has been handing the government customer emails and call records since 2001 or 2002.
In 2011, AT&T stepped up and began handing the NSA more than 1.1 billion cell phone call records per day. The NSA documents do not call AT&T by name, but descriptions of the company, its size, facilities, and customers more or less confirm its identity.
“We don’t comment on matters of national security,” said an AT&T spokesperson in response to the report.
In June, Congress passed the USA Freedom Act, which put an end to the bulk phone data collection. However, there was a provision in the act that allowed the program to be extended for a period of six months to give the government time to transition to another method of spying.
The NSA resumed collecting call records July 1.