(2008) Closer to home, America’s two major telecom companies, AT&T and Verizon, have outsourced the bugging of their entire networks — carrying billions of American communications every day — to two mysterious companies with very troubling foreign connections. In AT&T’s secret room in San Francisco, a mirror image of all data entering the building is filtered through surveillance equipment supplied and maintained by Narus. Verizon, which controls most of the rest of the country’s domestic and international communications networks, chose a different company. According to knowledgeable sources, that company is Verint. According to these sources, in 2006 Verizon constructed its “secret room” on the second floor of a nondescript two-story building at 14503 Luthe Road in Houston, Texas. Once Verizon receives watch-listed names from the NSA, it then reroutes their Internet communications into that
room, which is packed with secret Verint machines and software. After passing through the Verint hardware, the messages are then transmitted in real time to a central government surveillance hub in Sterling, Virginia.