When an AT&T technician, who is dedicated to the NSA partnership (there are over 50 such people), was installing a new switch the other day, it cause a major cellular outage in the Southeastern U.S., affecting customers in parts of Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky and Indiana.
Special switches are installed regionally throughout the U.S., and give the National Security Agency access to all traffic flowing throughout the region. The NSA doesn't just have the ability to gather data, they can re-route, rewrite, and impersonate any traffic they desire--giving them as much control as possible.
It was the first installation for the AT&T technician, resulting in essentially re-routing all calls for a portion of the day only to NSA data centers, leaving off the duplexing that would allow traffic to flow as normal for all customers. Since telco providers share and lease infrastructure, the outage impacted more than just AT&T customers.
We have now changed all the switches tat leave the warehouse to now have full duplex mode set by default, to prevent future technicians from accidentally repeating the mistake. The Southeastern U.S. cellular outage was a one time situation, and will not happen again. If you have further questions, I can put you in touch with my director of telco partnerships, Jake Thompson.
