Fairview (surveillance program)

[1] In 2013, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was harvesting the telephone metadata and text messages from over a billion subscribers in China; no precise program name was reported at the time.

[3] Several weeks later, Glenn Greenwald wrote in The Guardian about FAIRVIEW: "The NSA partners with a large US telecommunications company" that "partners with telecoms in the foreign countries, [which] then allow the US company access to those countries' telecommunications systems, and that access is then exploited to direct traffic to the NSA's repositories.

"[4] Documents provided by Snowden said the NSA had collected 2.3 billion separate pieces of data from Brazilian users in January 2013.

AT&T was first identified as FAIRVIEW's "key corporate partner" in 2013, by the Washington Post, quoting NSA historian Matthew Aid.

[16] Under the FAIRVIEW program, AT&T provided the NSA with domestic telephone metadata in bulk, which was authorized under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act.