In a new article published Monday, The Intercept has now revealed what it describes as secret AT&T facilities across several American cities that are "central to an NSA spying initiative."

The piece builds on earlier reporting that the website did in November 2016 which focused on one such site in New York City.

The eight locations, which are in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC, are "peering" facilities that normally route other telecom companies' data traffic onto their network as part of their regular Internet service.

However, one of the effects of this setup is that AT&T’s facilities reportedly can be used to siphon foreign packets into the hands of the NSA as the data passes through.

In AT&T’s internal jargon, these sites are referred to as "Service Node Routing Complexes," or SNRCs, which are mentioned by acronym in the cache of documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

NSA spokesman Christopher Augustine would neither "confirm nor deny" to The Intercept its alleged role in classified activities.

Meanwhile, AT&T spokesman Jim Greer emailed Ars to say that the company follows the law.

"We provide voluntary assistance to law enforcement when a person’s life is in danger and in other immediate, emergency situations," he wrote. "In all cases, we ensure that requests for assistance are valid and that we act in compliance with the law."

The Intercept also summarized and quoted from what it called a "top-secret NSA memo... which has not been disclosed before," which explained that the agency was knowingly over-collecting data. Why?

NSA systems are designed to go after certain "selectors"—a name, email address, or phone number. But if that selector is simply mentioned in a single email, for instance, "NSA will acquire a copy of the entire inbox, not just the individual email messages that contains the tasked selector."

The Intercept concluded that the data the NSA was able to sweep up at these sites was likely authorized by a Reagan-era executive order known as 12333, or "twelve triple three."

"12333 is used to target foreigners abroad, and collection happens outside the US," whistleblower John Tye, a former State Department official, told Ars after coming forward publicly in 2014. "My complaint is not that they're using it to target Americans; my complaint is that the volume of incidental collection on US persons is unconstitutional."

In other words, EO 12333 protects the tangential collection of Americans' data even when Americans aren't specifically targeted—otherwise, it would be forbidden under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978.

"Hypothetically, under 12333 the NSA could target a single foreigner abroad," Tye continued at the time. "And hypothetically if, while targeting that single person, they happened to collect every single Gmail and every single Facebook message on the company servers not just from the one person who is the target but from everyone—then the NSA could keep and use the data from those three billion other people. That's called 'incidental collection.' I will not confirm or deny that that is happening, but there is nothing in 12333 to prevent that from happening."