WASHINGTON, Aug. 15 -- U.S. telecom giant AT&T helped the country's National Security Agency (NSA) spy on vast Internet traffic, the New York Times reported on Saturday.

The U.S. telecom giant has a unique and productive cooperation with the NSA and this cooperation involved a broad range of classified activities, the newspaper said, citing newly disclosed NSA documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward J. Snowden, which dated from 2003 to 2013.

The company gave the NSA access, through several ways, to billions of emails flowing across its domestic networks, and all Internet communications at the United Nations headquarters, one of its customers, the daily said.

It installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its Internet hubs on American soil, far more than its competitor Verizon.

In September 2003, AT&T was the first partner to turn on a new collection capability that the NSA said amounted to a "live" presence on the global net, according to the documents reviewed by the newspaper.

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 has 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, it added.

Other U.S. telecom companies also had cooperation with the NSA, including Verizon, the newspaper said.