AT&T helped US spying on internet: Report

Washington: US telecom giant AT&T helped the country's National Security Agency (NSA) spy on vast internet traffic, a media report has said.

The US telecom giant has a productive cooperation with the NSA and this cooperation involved a broad range of classified activities, Xinhua cited the New York Times as saying on Saturday.

The company gave the NSA access to billions of emails flowing across its domestic networks and all internet communications at the United Nations headquarters, one of its customers, the daily cited from newly disclosed NSA documents, dated from 2003 to 2013, provided by former NSA contractor Edward J. Snowden.

It installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its internet hubs on American soil.

AT&T's corporate relationships provided unique accesses to other telecom or internet service providers, one of the documents said.

The company's sorting of data allowed the NSA to have different surveillance powers, including that over foreign-to-foreign traffic as large amounts of the world's internet communications travel across American cables, the report said.