Fairview (surveillance program)

FAIRVIEW is a secret program under which the National Security Agency cooperates with the American telecommunications company AT&T in order to collect phone, internet and e-mail data mainly of foreign countries' citizens at major cable landing stations and switching stations inside the United States. The FAIRVIEW program started in 1985, one year after the Bell breakup. In 2010, the NSA had access to these AT&T facilities: 8 internet peering points 26 VoIP router facilities 1 VoIP hub router facility (with 30 planned) 9 submarine cable landing points (with 7 planned) 16 4ESS circuit switching stations Except for the VoIP facilities, most are along U.S. borders. In 2011, NSA spent $188.9 million on the program, which was twice as much as on its second-largest program, STORMBREW. In 2013, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was harvesting the telephone metadata and text messages from over a billion subscribers in China; no precise program name was reported at the time. Several weeks later, Glenn Greenwald wrote in The Guardian about FAIRVIEW: "The NSA partners with a large US telecommunications company" that "partners with telecoms in the foreign countries, [which] then allow the US company access to those countries' telecommunications systems, and that access is then exploited to direct traffic to the NSA's repositories." Documents provided by Snowden said the NSA had collected 2.3 billion separate pieces of data from Brazilian users in January 2013. In 2013, Brazilian television showed a map of FAIRVIEW with markers all over the United States, but without a legend that explained what they stood for. AT&T was first identified as FAIRVIEW's "key corporate partner" in 2013, by the Washington Post, quoting NSA historian Matthew Aid. This was confirmed in 2015 by a joint report by ProPublica and the New York Times, based upon NSA documents that describe...