POWERFUL ALLIES. According to the report, AT&T didn't just give the NSA access to the emails, online chats, phone calls, and other data from customers using its network — it actively helped the agency process the data, prioritizing communications from certain nations and ranking data based on its potential intelligence value.
Officials from all the parties involved are remaining pretty tightlipped about the whole thing. The NSA neither confirms nor denies anything involving the AT&T facilities, while AT&T maintains it's just doing whatever the law requires. Still, it makes total sense that the NSA would want to partner with AT&T — after all, who better to facilitate government surveillance efforts than the world's largest telecommunications company?