Whistleblower says AT&T snooped on Net users

The National Security Agency has been monitoring the Internet traffic of U.S. residents, according to a retired AT&T engineer. Whistleblower and ex-AT&T employee Mark Klein said that the telecom has been diverting IP traffic to a secret NSA listening room in San Francisco.

Klein’s allegations of Internet traffic spying came to light in an online interview at MSNBC‘s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” last week. The infamous room 641A in AT&T’s San Francisco facility is accessible only to NSA-approved personnel, and Klein said that optical splitters sent a duplicate of every fiber-optic signal routed through its facilities into equipment behind its locked doors.

The traffic snooped on by the NSA wasn’t confined to AT&T’s customers, either. All Internet traffic that traveled over AT&T’s network was intercepted, regardless of origin, according to Klein.

“The splitter copied the entire data stream of those Internet cables into the secret room, and we’re talking about phone conversations, e-mail, Web browsing — everything that goes across the Internet,” Klein told Olbermann. “Whatever went across those cables … the entire data stream was copied into the room.”

Using FaceBook for college applications

Web startup Embark has launched a FaceBook tool letting high school students fill out college applications directly from that social networking site.

The Embark application helps students research school information and also see what schools their friends are interested in. They can fill out an application and send it to multiple schools simultaneously.