Ryan GallagherKonto zweryfikowane

The eight buildings are involved in an NSA program called FAIRVIEW, which has collected communications from AT&T's networks since 1985.

In 2003, the agency launched an internet surveillance initiative under FAIRVIEW & had within a few months swept up some 400 billion records about people’s online communications. AT&T sent millions of emails weekly to an NSA “keyword selection system.”

Our story shows how NSA used AT&T's infrastructure to tap into communications processed by other companies. Data from the likes of Sprint, Cogent, Level 3, Telia, Tata, Telecom Italia, & Deutsche Telekom is sent across AT&T's networks as part of so-called "peering" exchanges.

The NSA monitors what it calls "peering circuits" inside the eight buildings, which one former AT&T technician said "are liable to carry everybody’s [internet] traffic at one point or another during the day, or the week, or the year.”

AT&T worked with the NSA to rank communications flowing through its networks on the basis of intelligence value, prioritizing data depending on which country it was derived from, according to a top-secret document.

Internet data NSA collects from AT&T’s networks is sent to a “centralized processing facility” code-named PINECONE, located somewhere in New Jersey. There, the internet data passes through an AT&T “distribution box” to two NSA systems.

We sought out AT&T employees to confirm the locations of the buildings. “You put a gun to my head,” said AT&T’s former chief technology officer, “I’m not going to tell you.” Other people we spoke to, however, were more forthcoming.

“It’s eye-opening & ominous the extent to which this is happening right here on American soil,” said the Brennan Center's @LizaGoitein. “It puts a face on surveillance that we could never think of before in terms of actual buildings...in our own cities, in our own backyards.”

AT&T said it was “required by law to provide information to government & law enforcement entities by complying with court orders, subpoenas, lawful discovery requests, & other legal requirements.”

Another bit from the story: a previously undisclosed NSA memo reveals new details about a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruling from 2011, which declared one of the agency's surveillance programs to be unconstitutional.

A judge at the court ruled the agency had been unlawfully collecting tens of thousands of internet communications from “non-target United States persons and persons in the United States," b/c its systems were “generally incapable of distinguishing” between some kinds of data.

The memo reveals for the first time exactly what was happening: the agency was sweeping up people's entire email inboxes if they sent or received a single message that mentioned an identifier - like a phone number or email address - associated w/ a person on a target list.

That could have potentially included, for example, emails sent between two American lawyers or journalists, which mentioned a phone number for a person on NSA's target list. The lawyers or journalists inboxes would then have been swept up & their messages stored in NSA databases.

The judge, John D. Bates, said the spying violated the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. He ordered the agency to shut down the surveillance or modify the program so its analysts would not view the unlawfully collected messages.

The agency chose the latter option, and created a “cautionary banner” that warned its analysts not to read particular messages. But that did not solve the problem. And the violations continued for several years.

An NSA spokesperson said he wouldn't "confirm nor deny [the agency's] role in alleged classified intelligence activities." NSA operates "under the legal authorities established by Congress & is bound by both policy & law to protect US persons’ privacy & civil liberties,” he said.

I'm going to post a bunch of tweets answering some of the questions we've had since we published this story yesterday.

We don't believe there are any NSA personnel located at any of the eight facilities. They likely contain secure rooms, off limits to most AT&T employees, where the data "filtering" for NSA takes place.

We know PINECONE is in New Jersey, but have not (yet) verified exactly where.

As of 2013, AT&T had installed surveillance equipment inside facilities in at least 59 locations across the US, according to NSA documents. The number could be more or less today, we are not sure.