Reply #108: FRONTLINE Interview of Mark Klein, technician at AT&T inadvertently discovered Internet spying [View All]

[L. Coyote]

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/interviews/klein.html

What did you do for AT&T? How long did you work there?

I worked at AT&T for 22 and a half years. My job was basically to keep the systems going. They were computer systems, network communication systems, Internet equipment, Voice over Internet equipment. I tested circuits long distance across the country. That was my job: to keep the network up .......

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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.

Klein's "2004 Package" http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/etc/kleindoc.pdf
Before Klein retired in May 2004, he gathered a set of several hundred pages of documents that described in detail a secret surveillance room on the sixth floor of AT&T's Folsom Street facility in San Francisco. The general public has never seen the full collection of documents because they became part of the lawsuit against AT&T filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and put under court seal by a federal district judge in San Francisco. However, more than a year before that suit was filed, at the time when Klein originally decided to blow the whistle on the operation, he made this small sample of his documents available to attorneys and the press. Klein called this his "2004 package," to differentiate it from the larger package of documents put under court seal. "I am presenting this information to facilitate the dismantling of this dangerous Orwellian project," Klein writes in the introduction to the documents, which include instructions on how to implement the splitter, a floor plan and photos of the secret room.