Claim: NSA began monitoring AT&T calls in Feb. 2001

Plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against AT&T and other phone companies have filed an amended complaint with some startling claims. The lawsuit concerns the companies' allowing the National Security Agency to monitor the phone calls of their customers without the customers' knowledge or consent.

Among the claims in the amended complaint filed June 23 (taken verbatim from court documents):

*        Within eleven (11) days of the onset of the Bush administration, and at least seven (7) months prior to the attacks of September 11, 2001, defendant ATT began development of a center for monitoring long distance calls and internet transmissions and other digital information for the exclusive use of the NSA.

*        The center was put into development by ATT following a proposal by the NSA for the construction and development of a network operations center identical to ATT's own network operations center located in Bedminster, New Jersey for the exclusive use of the NSA.

*        The NSA proposal sought construction of a duplicate ATT Network Operations Center for the exclusive use of the NSA with the capacity to monitor all calls and internet traffic placed on the ATT long distance network, as well as ATT's wide area, fiber optic, T-1, T-3, T-5 and high speed data networks.

*        Such a data center would also enable the NSA to tap into any call placed on the ATT network and to monitor the contents of all digital information transmitted over the ATT network.

*        Said data center would enable the NSA to tap into any phone line and to monitor any digital transfer of information on ATT's networks including voice telephone calls, facsimile transmission and all internet traffic.

*        The NSA program was code-named Pioneer-Groundbreaker and was also known at ATT Solutions division as GEMS (Groundb (Groundbreaker Enterprise System).

*        International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) was one of the parties working with ATT and the NSA to develop the monitoring center and IBM personnel participated in meetings with ATT and NSA officials in the development of the monitoring center.

*        Among the purposes of the Pioneer-Groundbreaker project was the storing and monitoring of all phone call information coming across ATT's networks; by means of this program NSA sought to duplicate all of the phone call information that came across ATT's networks for real time, contemporaneous analysis or, alternately, for downloading and later use by the NSA.