Courtesy of Techdirt:

Back in January, the story came out that the EFF was suing AT&T, claiming that the company gave illegal access to the NSA of its network. Of course, plenty of people already believed that the NSA had pretty good access to the internet from a variety of places -- so the interesting thing here was both the specifics of how they did so, and the question of whether or not AT&T was violating customer rights in giving this free access. Earlier this week, the Justice Department tried to block evidence from being filed in the case -- even under seal. However, it seems like some of that information is coming out anyway, in large part thanks to a whistleblower who is explaining exactly how AT&T opened up its systems for the NSA to have pretty much unfettered access to the type of stuff you're normally supposed to get warrants to view -- and then in a much more limited manner. It's interesting to note, by the way, that the data mining technology that AT&T hooked up for the NSA came from Narus, the very same company that just sold VoIP blocking technology to the Chinese. Either way, this lawsuit is shaping up to be quite interesting, and it's likely that a lot more of this kind of information will be coming out over the course of the case -- even as the government tries to keep it quiet.