Wired has published a set of documents that a former AT&T employee says supports his allegations that the NSA built a “secret room” at AT&T headquarters in San Francisco for the purpose of spying on Internet traffic. A court had sealed the documents and denied a request from one privacy group to unseal them. Wired decided to published them anyway:

A file detailing aspects of AT&T’s alleged participation in the National Security Agency’s warrantless domestic wiretap operation is sitting in a San Francisco courthouse. But the public cannot see it because, at AT&T’s insistence, it remains under seal in court records. The judge in the case has so far denied requests from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF, and several news organizations to unseal the documents and make them public. AT&T claims information in the file is proprietary and that it would suffer severe harm if it were released. Based on what we’ve seen, Wired News disagrees. In addition, we believe the public’s right to know the full facts in this case outweighs AT&T’s claims to secrecy.

This is just the beginning of a bigger story. Right now we are seeing selective pieces of it leaked to the press by people who disapprove of the government’s methods and, in this case, of AT&T’s downsizing and alleged anti-union activities also. The government agencies tasked with preventing terrorist attacks cannot really explain what they are doing, because their activities are classified. Also, the legal justifications for some of these new methods for intelligence-gathering are complex and controversial — not all legal analysts agree on how communications law should be interpreted in a new era of high-tech terrorism. The advantage clearly goes to the leakers — and the news organizations that claim the right to declassify information and unseal court documents whenever it suits their interests.

UPDATE: More here.