Fairview is a secret program under which the

National Security Agency The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collectio ...

cooperates with the American telecommunications company

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile tel ...

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 The breakup of the Bell System was mandated on January 8, 1982, by an agreed consent decree providing that AT&T Corporation would, as had been initially proposed by AT&T, relinquish control of the Bell Operating Companies, which had provided loc ...

.New York Times
AT&T Helped U.S. Spy on Internet on a Vast Scale
& Pro Publica
NSA Spying Relies on AT&T’s ‘Extreme Willingness to Help’
August 15, 2015.

Corporate partner

The "key corporate partner" for cooperation under the FAIRVIEW program was first identified on October 23, 2013, by the ''

Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large na ...

''—quoting NSA historian

Matthew Aid Matthew Morris Aid (March 11, 1958 – August 20, 2018) was an American military historian and author. Aid graduated from Beloit College in 1980, having studied international relations. He studied the Russian language, while a member of the Unite ...

—as AT&T. This was confirmed by a joint report by ''

ProPublica ProPublica (), legally Pro Publica, Inc., is a nonprofit organization based in New York City. In 2010, it became the first online news source to win a Pulitzer Prize, for a piece written by one of its journalists''The Guardian'', April 13, 2010 ...

'' and the ''New York Times'' from August 15, 2015, based upon NSA documents that describe the company as "highly collaborative" and praise the company's "extreme willingness to help". In 2011, NSA spent $188.9 million on the program, which was twice as much as on its second-largest program,

STORMBREW STORMBREW is a secret internet surveillance program of the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States. It was disclosed in the summer of 2013 as part of the leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The FY 2013 budget for STORMBRE ...

Scope of the program

According to 2013 revelations by whistleblower

Edward Snowden Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American and naturalized Russian former computer intelligence consultant who leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013, when he was an employee and s ...

The NSA partners with a large US telecommunications company ... hichpartners with telecoms in the foreign countries, hichthen allow the US company access to those countries' telecommunications systems, and that access is then exploited to direct traffic to the NSA's repositories.

According to the revelations, the NSA had collected 2.3 billion separate pieces of data from Brazilian users in January 2013 alone. Several weeks earlier, Snowden had revealed that the NSA was also harvesting the telephone metadata and text messages from over a billion subscribers in China; however, no precise program name was reported at the time. US-990 Fairview Map - crop

A slide about the FAIRVIEW program that was seen on Brazilian television in 2013 showed a map with markers all over the United States, but without a legend that explained what they stood for. From a similar map with the proper legend, that was published in August 2015, it became clear that in 2010 the NSA had access to the following AT&T facilities:Electrospaces.net
FAIRVIEW: Collecting foreign intelligence inside the US
August 31, 2015 * 8

internet peering point In computer networking, peering is a voluntary interconnection of administratively separate Internet networks for the purpose of exchanging traffic between the "down-stream" users of each network. Peering is settlement-free, also known as "bill ...

s * 26

VoIP Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also called IP telephony, is a method and group of technologies for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. The terms Interne ...

router facilities * 1 VoIP hub router facility (with 30 planned) * 9 submarine

cable landing point A cable landing point is the location where a submarine or other underwater cable makes landfall. The term is most often used for the landfall points of submarine telecommunications cables and submarine power cables. The landing will either be d ...

s (with 7 planned) * 16 4ESS circuit switching stations Except for the VoIP facilities, most of these access points are situated along the US borders.

Legal authorities

The collection of data under the FAIRVIEW program takes place under different legal authorities:

FISA The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 ("FISA" , ) is a United States federal law that establishes procedures for the physical and electronic surveillance and the collection of "foreign intelligence information" between "foreign pow ...

, which requires individualized warrants from the FISA Court, section 702 FAA for when one end of the communications is foreign, and the Transit Authority for when both ends of a communications are foreign. Under the FAIRVIEW program, AT&T also provided the NSA with domestic telephone metadata in bulk, which was authorized under section 215 of the

USA PATRIOT Act The USA PATRIOT Act (commonly known as the Patriot Act) was a landmark Act of the United States Congress, signed into law by President George W. Bush. The formal name of the statute is the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appro ...

. First this was from landline connections, but in 2011, AT&T also started handing over cell phone metadata: 1.1 billion a day.

Media related to FAIRVIEW

File:Transit authority (3) -crop.jpg, Upstream: Transit Authority File:Transit authority map -Crop.jpg, Upstream: Map of Transit Authority File:Unique aspects-crop.jpg, Upstream: Unique Aspects File:US-990 Fairview - crop.jpg, FAIRVIEW: Summary File:Help us help you- straight.jpg, "B-reel" 2nd FAIRVIEW presentation: help us help you File:Where SSO is accessing your target (3).jpg, 2nd FAIRVIEW presentation: Where SS0 is accessing your target

External links

NSA Spying Relies on AT&T’s ‘Extreme Willingness to Help’

References

{{National Security Agency 2013 scandals Intelligence agency programmes revealed by Edward Snowden Counterterrorism in the United States Espionage Human rights Mass surveillance National Security Agency Obama administration controversies Privacy in the United States Privacy of telecommunications Surveillance scandals Surveillance United States national security policy War on terror