Julie Beasley looked out her window one morning and saw a teenager changing clothes in the middle of the street.

"She opened a passenger side door and dropped her pants. She took her pants off and reached in the car and pulled out a skirt. Then she put the skirt on and pulled off her sweatshirt. She had on a camisole with spaghetti straps with her midriff showing," says Beasley, 46, of Iowa City.

Living less than two blocks from a high school gives Beasley a bird's-eye view of teenagers - and a startling view, as well.

"I'm not a mother," she says. "All of it surprises me. I think they're oblivious to adults, period."

To baby boomers and other adults of a certain age, young people may seem rude, disrespectful and generally clueless about established social mores.

But to social scientists, the phenomenon is more complicated.

Raised by parents who stressed individualism and informality, these young people grew up in a society that is more open and offers more choices than in their parents' youth, says child and adolescent psychologist Dave Verhaagen of Charlotte.

Unlike their parents, they have never known anything but a world dominated by technology. Even their social lives revolve around the Web, iPods and cellphones. So they dress down, talk loose and reveal their innermost thoughts online.

"Put that all together and you've got a generation that doesn't have the same concept of privacy and personal boundaries as generations before," Verhaagen says.

"They're tuned out in some ways to the social graces around them and the people in their lives, in their physical realm, and tuned in to the people they're with virtually," says psychologist and sociologist Sherry Turkle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

On top of that, young people don't care as much about making a good impression as their parents and grandparents did growing up, says Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University.

She studied 40,745 young people who took surveys from 1958 to 2001 with questions such as "I am always careful in my manner of dress" and "I never forget to say 'please' or 'thank you.' " People who score high on social-approval questions display conventional behavior; those who score low are not as concerned with what others think.

In 1999, 76% of kids ages 8 to 12 (now in high school or college) paid little attention to social approval, up from 57% in 1970. Among college students in 2001, it was 62%, compared with 56% in 1970. The findings are published in Twenge's book, Generation Me.

Turkle, who studies the effects of technology on identity and social interaction, points to young people's "other-directedness" and use of ubiquitous technology to always be in touch with their peers.

If someone's self-identity is fragile, as is the case with many young people, he or she needs to bolster it "by constant contact with others who validate and enable them," she says. "Now you go to your Facebook entry and look at the comments left for you, and your sense of self can be shored up by the 50 people who have commented."

Says Verhaagen, author of Parenting the Millennial Generation: "Their ability to have multiple conversations through multiple technologies is different from previous generations, but in and of itself is not a bad thing.

"This generation uses technology to facilitate relationships and interactions in a way other generations never have. They are talking on a cellphone, IMing somebody, playing
Xbox and having three or four parallel conversations," maybe ignoring someone else sitting in the same room.

Such multitasking "does not fit with the current social mores of adults, but over the years, I think it will not be regarded as rude."

Right now, young people are "not in positions of leadership and power, and they have to play by the rules of other generations." That will change. "Over time, these kids will bring a different attitude and shape the culture of business and adult interactions in a way that we haven't seen before."

But for now, it still drives some adults crazy when they see young people wearing jeans or camisoles with spaghetti straps to church, or talking to parents and teachers the same casual way as friends.

"I'll talk to them a certain way, kidding with them, and they take it disrespectfully," says Danielle Nelson, 15, of Edgewater, Md.

"Our generation just is not raising our kids the way our parents did," says her mother, Beth Nelson, 45.

"I think there's a difference between respect and formality. You can be casual and show appropriate levels of respect."

Adults may believe that young people don't care about social standards, but they do, says syndicated columnist Judith Martin, better known as Miss Manners, author of the updated Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior.

"Young people care deeply about the norms and practices of their contemporaries," she says. They just don't understand "that the standards of adults affect them."

Jacob Krell, 17, of Austin recalls his mother's warning as she helped him dye his hair during a short-lived blue-hair phase in middle school.

"She said, 'You're going to have to work twice as hard now to garner respect,' " says Krell, who will be a freshman in film studies at New York University this fall.

He says he's not sure how much respect he lost with his blue hair, but he acknowledges, "I probably didn't gain much, either."

Respect is something that Cupertino, Calif., high school teacher Arcadia Conrad has thought a lot about. At 33, she is not so far removed in age from her students, but she's eons away in attitude.

As an interviewer of prospective college students for Vassar, her alma mater, Conrad recalls a student showing up in "flip-flops and a miniskirt and her hair still wet."

"I'm one of the people making college decisions," she says. "I told her she was not on her way to the beach: 'Couldn't you have dried your hair?' "

Conrad, who teaches English and theater arts, says she often has to remind students who work as ushers or at concessions for school performances that listening to an iPod or talking with their friends on the job isn't appropriate.

"They seem to have a lot of trouble with the concept of putting your best foot forward," she says.

But technology and the way the young relate to it are creating the most adult consternation, Verhaagen says. He cites as an example a high school senior from an exclusive private school who was an intern at his office and spent a staff meeting text-messaging friends.

He didn't intend to be rude, but "he was clearly not tuned in to the fact that our expectations and cultural mores were different. If you grow up in a culture that says it's all about you, it's hard to think it isn't."

Such thinking isn't limited to the USA. In Great Britain, Prime Minister
Tony Blair is trying to regain some of the decorum that he believes the younger generation has lost.

This year, he outlined a Respect Action Plan that he hopes will reverse what he terms anti-social behavior - everything from neighbors refusing to lower the sound on stereos to teens menacing shop owners and customers. His plan, an updated version of his 1997 Anti-Social Behavior Orders, aims to have parents take more responsibility for children's behavior and shows young people how to live in a society of rules. Those who don't follow rules face fines or other punishments.

Teacher Conrad faults society more than she does young people.

"I don't think we're requiring civic responsibility anymore - the social graces, ceremony and ritual, dress codes, social mores and manners," she says. "My students seem to be saying, 'I can separate myself from whatever experience I'm in and create my own bubble.' "

Turkle, however, believes the infatuation with technology will lessen, and people will be better able to balance the real and the virtual parts of their lives.

"Ultimately, we're going to find a way to live in both ways at the same time - be nicer to each other in real life and not be clueless to the person sitting next to them," she says. "We'll settle down and have greater civility and care."

Others identified as active data brokers refused to answer questions about how they conduct business, invoking their constitutional rights against saying anything under oath that might be used by prosecutors.

Rapp described what steps he would use, for example, to locate and steal the credit-card records of Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., saying he would first trick a utility operator to reveal her home address. He also boasted that he could uncover the bank password of Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., in one hour.

"It's just playing the game," said Rapp, who told lawmakers he now cares full-time for his elderly mother in Colorado and lives off his family's savings.

Lawmakers were impressed - and troubled - as Rapp explained how easily customer service representatives at America's leading telephone and credit companies can be duped into revealing private account information.

"I don't think we have any privacy at all," said Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla.

Brokers have tricked telephone carriers into disclosing private customer information and broken into online accounts, in some cases guessing passwords that were the names of pets, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

"She has two pets, one named Rainbow and the other is Max," wrote Donnie Tidmore of Waco, Texas, in September in an e-mail to one such data broker, PDJ Investigations of Granbury, Texas.

Tidmore, a private detective, also works as police chief in nearby Crawford, Texas, where President Bush owns his ranch. Tidmore wanted lists of cellular calls and the Social Security number of a Virgin Mobile USA subscriber for a case.

Tidmore told the AP on Wednesday the data brokers he used obtained information through legal means, but he acknowledged he has no idea how PDJ could obtain another person's phone records lawfully without a subpoena or warrant.

Tidmore agreed that, in his capacity as police chief, he would have needed a subpoena or warrant to obtain a citizen's phone records.

PDJ's owner, Patrick Baird, was among 11 people identified as data brokers who refused to testify during Wednesday's congressional hearing, invoking their Fifth Amendment rights not to incriminate themselves. They included Jim Welker, a Colorado state lawmaker who operated Universal Communications Co., which advertised it could obtain lists of anyone's telephone calls for $50.

The head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Joe Barton (news, bio, voting record), R-Texas, promised to press for a broader vote in Congress soon on legislation the panel already approved to outlaw efforts to impersonate customers to trick companies into revealing personal records, a practice known as "pretexting."

Another data broker, Michele Yontef, smiled slightly when Rep. Ed Whitfield, R-Ky., read excerpts from an e-mail she sent to a colleague in July 2005 in which she complained: "I was shot down four times. ... I keep getting northwestern call center and they just must have had an operator meeting about pretext as every operator is cued in."

Yontef was described as legendary among data-brokers, so skillful in obtaining private phone records that she was known as "Ma Bell." She also declined to answer questions from lawmakers, citing the Fifth Amendment.

The congressional inquiry was expected to resume Thursday, when lawmakers question officials from federal and local police agencies over their use of data brokers to gather personal telephone records without a subpoena or warrant.

The details provided by the two former workers about the Bridgeton room bear the distinctive earmarks of an operation run by the National Security Agency, according to two intelligence experts with extensive knowledge of the NSA and its operations. In addition to the room's high-tech security, those intelligence experts told Salon, the exhaustive vetting process AT&T workers were put through before being granted top-secret security clearance points to the NSA, an agency known as much for its intense secrecy as its technological sophistication.

"It was very hush-hush," said one of the former AT&T workers. "We were told there was going to be some government personnel working in that room. We were told, 'Do not try to speak to them. Do not hamper their work. Do not impede anything that they're doing.'"

The importance of the Bridgeton facility is its role in managing the "common backbone" for all of AT&T's Internet operations. According to one of the former workers, Bridgeton serves as the technical command center from which the company manages all the routers and circuits carrying the company's domestic and international Internet traffic. Therefore, Bridgeton could be instrumental for conducting surveillance or collecting data.

If the NSA is using the secret room, it would appear to bolster recent allegations that the agency has been conducting broad and possibly illegal domestic surveillance and data collection operations authorized by the Bush administration after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. AT&T's Bridgeton location would give the NSA potential access to an enormous amount of Internet data -- currently, the telecom giant controls approximately one-third of all bandwidth carrying Internet traffic to homes and businesses across the United States.

The nature of the government operation using the Bridgeton room remains unknown, and could be legal. Aside from surveillance or data collection, the room could conceivably house a federal law enforcement operation, a classified research project, or some other unknown government operation.

The former workers, both of whom were approached by and spoke separately to Salon, asked to remain anonymous because they still work in the telecommunications industry. They both left the company in good standing. Neither worked inside the secured room or has access to classified information. One worked in AT&T's broadband division until 2003. The other asked to be identified only as a network technician, and worked at Bridgeton for about three years.

The disclosure of the room in Bridgeton follows assertions made earlier this year by a former AT&T worker in California, Mark Klein, who revealed that the company had installed a secret room in a San Francisco facility and reconfigured its circuits, allegedly to help collect data for use by the government. In detailed documents he provided to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Klein also alleged there were other secret rooms at AT&T facilities in other U.S. cities.

NSA expert Matthew Aid, who has spent the last decade researching a forthcoming three-volume history of the agency, said of the Bridgeton room: "I'm not a betting man, but if I had to plunk $100 down, I'd say it's safe that it's NSA." Aid told Salon he believes the secret room is likely part of "what is obviously a much larger operation, or series of interrelated operations" combining foreign intelligence gathering with domestic eavesdropping and data collection.

"You're talking about a backbone for computer communications, and that's NSA," Russ Tice, a former high-level NSA intelligence officer, told Salon. Tice, a 20-year veteran of multiple U.S. intelligence agencies, worked for the NSA until spring 2005. "Whatever is happening there with the security you're talking about is a whole lot more closely held than what's going on with the Klein case" in San Francisco, he said. (The San Francisco room is secured only by a special combination lock, according to the Klein documents.)

Tice added that for an operation requiring access to routers and gateways, "the obvious place to do it is right at the source."

In a statement provided to Salon, NSA spokesman Don Weber said: "Given the nature of the work we do, it would be irresponsible to comment on actual or alleged operational issues as it would give those wishing to do harm to the United States insight that could potentially place Americans in danger; therefore, we have no information to provide. However, it is important to note that NSA takes its legal responsibilities seriously and operates within the law."

Since last December, news reports have asserted that the NSA has conducted warrantless spying on the phone and e-mail communications of thousands of people inside the U.S., and has been secretly collecting the phone call records of millions of Americans, using data provided by major telecommunications companies, including AT&T. Such operations would represent a fundamental shift in the NSA's secretive mission, which over the last three decades is widely understood to have focused exclusively on collecting signals intelligence from abroad.

The reported operations have sparked fierce protest by lawmakers and civil liberties advocates, and have raised fundamental questions about the legality of Bush administration policies, including their consequences for the privacy rights of Americans. The Bush administration has acknowledged the use of domestic surveillance operations since Sept. 11, 2001, but maintains they are conducted within the legal authority of the presidency. Several cases challenging the legality of the alleged spying operations are now pending in federal court, including suits against the federal government, and AT&T, among other telecom companies.

In a statement provided to Salon, AT&T spokesman Walt Sharp said: "If and when AT&T is asked by government agencies for help, we do so strictly within the law and under the most stringent conditions. Beyond that, we can't comment on matters of national security."

According to the two former AT&T workers and the Klein documents, the room in the pivotal Bridgeton facility was set up several months before the room in San Francisco. According to the Klein documents, the work order for the San Francisco room came from Bridgeton, suggesting that Bridgeton has a more integral role in operations using the secured rooms.

The company's Bridgeton network operations center, where approximately 100 people work, is located inside a one-story brick building with a small two-story addition connected to it. The building shares a parking lot with a commercial business and is near an interstate highway.

According to the two former workers, the secret room is an internal structure measuring roughly 20 feet by 40 feet, and was previously used by employees of the company's WorldNet division. In spring 2002, they said, the company moved WorldNet employees to a different part of the building and sealed up the room, plastering over the window openings and installing steel double doors with no handles for moving equipment in and out of the room. The company then installed the high-tech mantrap, which has opaque Plexiglas-like doors that prevent anyone outside the room from seeing clearly into the mantrap chamber, or the room beyond it. Both former workers say the mantrap drew attention from employees for being so high-tech.

Telecom companies commonly use mantraps to secure data storage facilities, but they are typically less sophisticated, requiring only a swipe card to pass through. The high-tech mantrap in Bridgeton seems unusual because it is located in an otherwise low-key, small office building. Tice said it indicates "something going on that's very important, because you're talking about an awful lot of money" to pay for such security measures.

The vetting process for AT&T workers granted access to the room also points to the NSA, according to Tice and Aid.

The former network technician said he knows at least three AT&T employees who have been working in the room since 2002. "It took them six months to get the top-security clearance for the guys," the network technician said. "Although they work for AT&T, they're actually doing a job for the government." He said that each of them underwent extensive background checks before starting their jobs in the room. The vetting process included multiple polygraph tests, employment history reviews, and interviews with neighbors and school instructors, going as far back as elementary school.

Aid said that type of vetting is precisely the kind NSA personnel who receive top-secret SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information) clearance go through. "Everybody who works at NSA has an SCI clearance," said Aid.

It's possible the Bridgeton room is being used for a federal law enforcement operation. According to the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994, telecom companies are required to assist law enforcement officials who have legal authorization to conduct electronic surveillance, either in pursuit of criminal suspects or for the protection of national security. The companies must design or modify their systems to make such surveillance possible, essentially by making them wiretap-ready.

The FBI is the primary federal agency that tracks and apprehends terrorist suspects within the U.S. Yet, there are several indications that the Bridgeton room does not involve the FBI.

"The FBI, which is probably the least technical agency in the U.S. government, doesn't use mantraps," Aid said. "But virtually every area of the NSA's buildings that contain sensitive operations require you to go through a mantrap with retinal and fingerprint scanners. All of the sensitive offices in NSA buildings have them." The description of the opaque Plexiglas-like doors in Bridgeton, Aid said, indicates that the doors are likely infused with Kevlar for bulletproofing -- another signature measure that he said is used to secure NSA facilities: "You could be inside and you can't kick your way out. You can't shoot your way out. Even if you put plastique explosives, all you could do is blow a very small hole in that opaque glass."

Jameel Jaffer, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union's national security program, said it is unlikely that the FBI would set up an ongoing technical operation -- in this case, for several years running -- inside a room of a telecommunications company. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, passed by Congress in 1978, requires law enforcement officials to obtain warrants from a secret federal court for domestic surveillance operations involving the protection of national security. If the FBI (or another federal agency) wanted data, it would more likely be targeting a specific individual or set of individuals suspected of engaging in criminal or terrorist activities. The agency would obtain a warrant and then call AT&T, or show up in person with the warrant and ask for the wiretap to be engaged. According to Jaffer, the FBI, NSA or any other federal agency could also legally tap into communications data under federal guidelines using technical means that would not require technical assistance of a telecom company.

In an e-mail statement to Salon, FBI spokesperson Paul Bresson said: "The FBI does not confirm whether or not we are involved in an alleged ongoing operational activity. In all cases, FBI operations are conducted in strict accordance with established Department of Justice guidelines, FBI policy, and the law."

Rather than specifically targeted surveillance, it is also possible that the Bridgeton room is being used for a classified government project, such as data mining, with which the Pentagon has experimented in the past. Data mining uses automated methods to search through large volumes of data, looking for patterns that might help identify terrorist suspects, for example. According to Tice, private sector employees who work on classified government projects for the NSA are required to undergo the same kind of top-secret security clearance that AT&T workers in the Bridgeton room underwent.

According to the former network technician, all three AT&T employees he knows who work inside the room have network technician and administration backgrounds -- not research backgrounds -- suggesting that those workers are only conducting maintenance or technical operations inside the room.

Furthermore, Tice said it is much more likely that any classified project using data collected via a corporate facility would take place in separate facilities: "The information that you garner from something like a room siphoning information and filtering it would be sent to some place where you'd have people thinking about what to do with that data," he said.

Dave Farber, a respected computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and former chief technologist for the Federal Communications Commission, also said it is likely that data collected in a facility like the Bridgeton center would be used elsewhere, once the facility is set up to divert the data. "If I own the routers, I can put code in there to have them monitor for certain data. That's not a particularly difficult job," said Farber, who is considered one of the pioneers of Internet architecture. Farber said that "packets" of data can essentially be copied and then sent to some other location for use. "Most of the problems would have to do with keeping your staff from knowing too much about it."

According to the former network technician, workers at Bridgeton, at the direction of government officials, could conceivably collect data using any AT&T router around the country, which he says number between 1,500 and 2,000. To do so, the company would need to install a wiretap-like device at select locations for "sniffing" the desired data. That could explain the purpose of the San Francisco room divulged by Klein, as well as the secret rooms he alleged existed at AT&T facilities in other U.S. cities.

"The network sniffer with the right software can capture anything," the former network technician said. "You can get people's e-mail, VoIP phone calls, [calls made over the Internet] -- even passwords and credit card transactions -- as long as you have the right software to decrypt that."

In theory, surveillance involving Internet communications can be executed legally under federal law. "But with most of these things," Farber said, "the problem is that it just takes one small step to make it illegal."