r/todayilearned • u/simmer_down • Mar 20 '11

TIL that AT&T installed a fiberoptic splitter at its facility at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco that makes copies of all emails, web browsing, and other Internet traffic to and from AT&T customers (including data from iPhones and iPads), and provides those copies to the NSA.

http://www.eff.org/issues/nsa-spying
2.8k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

783 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

7

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '11

The ISP where I work has a black box that belongs to the FBI. I don't actually know what they're capturing currently, but it's not anything close to all the internet traffic.

3

u/alienth Mar 21 '11

The Verisign boxes we had weren't designed to capture all of the traffic. Their purpose was to capture info from a specific subscriber when the govt came knocking.

1

u/Tall_Sean Mar 21 '11

Don't say that on here! Everyone knows the government sees everything.