One of the common gripes I’ve heard regarding the recent leak of NSA documents pertaining to the extent we’re being spied on is that “we already know this stuff, why is it a big deal now?”
It’s a fair point to make (albeit, you’ve done so in a particularly annoying fashion), but it’s always good to be reminded that sometimes the State can be openly malevolent. However, one thing we weren’t counting on: the gripers are right.
Like, exactly right.
We already do know this stuff, because in 2006, AT&T technician Mark Klein told us. We just weren’t listening.
Klein worked at AT&T for 22 years and traveled from New York to California. According to his testimony in front of a District Court Judge in Northern California in 2006, it was during his final years at the corporation that he saw anything suspect or out of the ordinary.
In January 2003, I, along with others, toured the AT&T central office on Folsom Street in San Francisco — actually three floors of an SBC building. There I saw a new room being built adjacent to the 4ESS switch room where the public’s phone calls are routed. I learned that the person whom the NSA interviewed for the secret job was the person working to install equipment in this room. The regular technician work force was not allowed in the room.
[…]
In San Francisco the “secret room” is Room 641A at 611 Folsom Street, the site of a large SBC phone building, three floors of which are occupied by AT&T. High speed fiber optic circuits come in on the 8th floor and run down to the 7th floor where they connect to routers for AT&T’s WorldNet service, part of the latter’s vital “Common Backbone.” In order to snoop on these circuits, a special cabinet was installed and cabled to the “secret room” on the 6th floor to monitor the information going through the circuits. (The location code of the cabinet is 070177.04, which denotes the 7th floor, aisle 177 and bay 04.) The “secret room” itself is roughly 24-by-48 feet, containing perhaps a dozen cabinets including such equipment as Sun servers and two Juniper routers, plus an industrial-size air conditioner.
[…]
While doing my job, I learned that fiber optic cables from the secret room were tapping into the WorldNet circuits by splitting off a portion of the light signal. I saw this in a design document available to me, entitled “Study Group 3, LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco” dated Dec. 10, 2002. I also saw design documents dated Jan. 13, 2004 and Jan. 24, 2003, which instructed technicians on connecting some of the already in-service circuits to the “splitter” cabinet, which diverts some of the light signal to the secret room. The circuits listed were the Peering Links, which connect Worldnet with other networks and hence the whole country, as well as the rest of the world.
So, why wasn’t Klein’s story bigger news at the time? After all, we had a Bush/Cheney White House and disturbing revelations were starting to come out regarding the national security-obsessed “shadow” government Cheney had been setting up.
Well, actually…
Former AT&T technician Mark Klein has come forward to support the EFF’s lawsuit against AT&T for its alleged complicity in the NSA’s electronic surveillance. Here, Wired News publishes Klein’s public statement in its entirety.
Whistle-blower AT&T technician Mark Klein says his effort to reveal alleged government surveillance of domestic Internet traffic was blocked not only by U.S. intelligence officials but also by the top editors of the Los Angeles Times.
In his first broadcast interview, as seen tonight on Nightline, Klein describes how he stumbled across “secret NSA rooms” being installed at an AT&T switching center in San Francisco and later heard of similar rooms in at least six other cities, including Atlanta, San Diego, Los Angeles, Palo Alto, San Jose and Seattle.
“You needed an ordinary key and the code to punch into a key pad on the door, and the only person who had both of those things was the one guy cleared by the NSA,” Klein says of the “secret room” at the AT&T center in San Francisco.
Klein worked for more than 20 years as a technician at AT&T. Here he tells the story of how he inadvertently discovered that the whole flow of Internet traffic in several AT&T operations centers was being regularly diverted to the National Security Agency (NSA). Klein is a witness in a lawsuit filed against AT&T by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which alleges AT&T illegally gave the NSA access to its networks. This is the edited transcript of an interview conducted on Jan. 9, 2007.
The Washington Post, Nov. 7, 2007:
The plain-spoken, bespectacled Klein, 62, said he may be the only person in the country in a position to discuss firsthand knowledge of an important aspect of the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program. He is retired, so he isn’t worried about losing his job. He did not have security clearance, and the documents in his possession were not classified, he said. He has no qualms about “turning in,” as he put it, the company where he worked for 22 years until he retired in 2004.
“If they’ve done something massively illegal and unconstitutional — well, they should suffer the consequences,” Klein said. “It’s not my place to feel bad for them. They made their bed, they have to lie in it. The ones who did [anything wrong], you can be sure, are high up in the company. Not the average Joes, who I enjoyed working with.”
Here’s a link full of stories about Klein over at the EFF.
Klein’s story was followed (albeit on a low level) by the media for several years, and yet it still barely registered to the American public. Maybe the difference is, now that whistleblowing is a little more public, people are paying attention better?
(To be clear, this in no way takes away from the new revelations coming from Greenwald and Snowden. History is simply repeating itself. Hopefully this time, we get it — and get it right.)