The One
26th October 2010, 12:37
A technician at AT&T in San Francisco became curious when he discovered that our top electronics intelligence agency was building a secret room in the communications building to inspect not only the traffic but the content of messages that you and I were sending over the Internet.
He blew the whistle.
Congress is now being asked by the obama administration to retroactively immunize the communications companies that are supposed to be serving us but are really turning our thoughts over to the government.
During my lifetime, I can think of a few regimes that emphasized the need to know the thoughts of their citizens: Stalin's USSR and its purge trials and gulag, Hitler's Germany and its death camps, and Pol Pot's Cambodia with its killing fields.
Do we really want to be in this business?
We'll read everyone's mail in order to catch the bad guy?
Well, why not, you say. After all, he's a bad guy who wants to destroy us, right?
Right.
We still don't allow general searches to catch those who are trying to subvert us, from smuggling goods past the tax and customs inspectors (subverting us economically), to hiding and selling drugs, guns, etc. Law enforcement is still required to obtain a search warrant based on individualized suspicion and probable cause to believe that you are holding contraband in a particular place (which is described as your house, for example, not all of the apartments in your building).
This battle was fought and won generations ago, embodied in our Constitution. I would've thought that the Bush administration originalists would've realized this. Don't tell me that they suddenly believe in an 'evolving' constitution, as I do, which meets new and emerging circumstances.
At any rate, governments which spy on their citizens in secret are rotten to the core, or so it seems.
What do you think?
A Story of Surveillance
Former Technician 'Turning In' AT&T Over NSA Program
By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 7, 2007; Page D01
His first inkling that something was amiss came in summer 2002 when he opened the door to admit a visitor from the National Security Agency to an office of AT&T in San Francisco.
"What the heck is the NSA doing here?" Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician, said he asked himself.
In an interview yesterday, he alleged that the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T . Contrary to the government's depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists, Klein said, much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic. Klein said he believes that the NSA was analyzing the records for usage patterns as well as for content.
He said the NSA built a special room to receive data streamed through an AT&T Internet room containing "peering links," or major connections to other telecom providers. The largest of the links delivered 2.5 gigabits of data -- the equivalent of one-quarter of the Encyclopedia Britannica's text -- per second, said Klein, whose documents and eyewitness account form the basis of one of the first lawsuits filed against the telecom giants after the government's warrantless-surveillance program was reported in the New York Times in December 2005.
Claudia Jones, an AT&T spokeswoman, said she had no comment on Klein's allegations. "AT&T is fully committed to protecting our customers' privacy. We do not comment on matters of national security," she said.(suprise suprise)
The NSA and the White House also declined comment on Klein's allegations.
Klein is urging Congress not to block Hepting v. AT&T, a class-action suit pending in federal court in San Francisco, as well as 37 other lawsuits charging carriers with illegally collaborating with the NSA. He was accompanied yesterday by lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed Hepting v. AT&T in 2006. Together, they are urging key U.S. senators to oppose a pending White House-endorsed immunity provision that would effectively wipe out the lawsuits. The Judiciary Committee is expected to take up the measure Thursday.
In summer 2002, Klein was working in an office responsible for Internet equipment when an NSA representative arrived to interview a management-level technician for a special job whose details were secret.
"That's when my antennas started to go up," he said. He knew that the NSA was supposed to work on overseas signals intelligence.
The job entailed building a "secret room" in an AT&T office 10 blocks away, he said. By coincidence, in October 2003, Klein was transferred to that office and assigned to the Internet room. He asked a technician there about the secret room on the 6th floor, and the technician told him it was connected to the Internet room a floor above. The technician, who was about to retire, handed him some wiring diagrams.
Another document showed that the NSA installed in the room a semantic traffic analyzer made by Narus, which Klein said indicated that the NSA was doing content analysis.
Steve Bannerman, Narus's marketing vice president, said in an interview that the NarusInsight system is "the world's most powerful Internet traffic processing engine." He said it is used to detect worms, as well as to capture information to help authorities stop criminal activity. He said it can track a communication's origin and destination, as well as its content. He declined to comment on AT&T's use of the system.
Klein said he decided to go public after President Bush defended the NSA's surveillance program as limited to collecting phone calls between suspected terrorists overseas and people in the United States. Klein said the documents show that the scope was much broader.
Klein was last in Washington in 1969, to take part in an antiwar protest. Now, he said with a chuckle, he's here in a gray suit as a lobbyist
He blew the whistle.
Congress is now being asked by the obama administration to retroactively immunize the communications companies that are supposed to be serving us but are really turning our thoughts over to the government.
During my lifetime, I can think of a few regimes that emphasized the need to know the thoughts of their citizens: Stalin's USSR and its purge trials and gulag, Hitler's Germany and its death camps, and Pol Pot's Cambodia with its killing fields.
Do we really want to be in this business?
We'll read everyone's mail in order to catch the bad guy?
Well, why not, you say. After all, he's a bad guy who wants to destroy us, right?
Right.
We still don't allow general searches to catch those who are trying to subvert us, from smuggling goods past the tax and customs inspectors (subverting us economically), to hiding and selling drugs, guns, etc. Law enforcement is still required to obtain a search warrant based on individualized suspicion and probable cause to believe that you are holding contraband in a particular place (which is described as your house, for example, not all of the apartments in your building).
This battle was fought and won generations ago, embodied in our Constitution. I would've thought that the Bush administration originalists would've realized this. Don't tell me that they suddenly believe in an 'evolving' constitution, as I do, which meets new and emerging circumstances.
At any rate, governments which spy on their citizens in secret are rotten to the core, or so it seems.
What do you think?
A Story of Surveillance
Former Technician 'Turning In' AT&T Over NSA Program
By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 7, 2007; Page D01
His first inkling that something was amiss came in summer 2002 when he opened the door to admit a visitor from the National Security Agency to an office of AT&T in San Francisco.
"What the heck is the NSA doing here?" Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician, said he asked himself.
In an interview yesterday, he alleged that the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T . Contrary to the government's depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists, Klein said, much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic. Klein said he believes that the NSA was analyzing the records for usage patterns as well as for content.
He said the NSA built a special room to receive data streamed through an AT&T Internet room containing "peering links," or major connections to other telecom providers. The largest of the links delivered 2.5 gigabits of data -- the equivalent of one-quarter of the Encyclopedia Britannica's text -- per second, said Klein, whose documents and eyewitness account form the basis of one of the first lawsuits filed against the telecom giants after the government's warrantless-surveillance program was reported in the New York Times in December 2005.
Claudia Jones, an AT&T spokeswoman, said she had no comment on Klein's allegations. "AT&T is fully committed to protecting our customers' privacy. We do not comment on matters of national security," she said.(suprise suprise)
The NSA and the White House also declined comment on Klein's allegations.
Klein is urging Congress not to block Hepting v. AT&T, a class-action suit pending in federal court in San Francisco, as well as 37 other lawsuits charging carriers with illegally collaborating with the NSA. He was accompanied yesterday by lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed Hepting v. AT&T in 2006. Together, they are urging key U.S. senators to oppose a pending White House-endorsed immunity provision that would effectively wipe out the lawsuits. The Judiciary Committee is expected to take up the measure Thursday.
In summer 2002, Klein was working in an office responsible for Internet equipment when an NSA representative arrived to interview a management-level technician for a special job whose details were secret.
"That's when my antennas started to go up," he said. He knew that the NSA was supposed to work on overseas signals intelligence.
The job entailed building a "secret room" in an AT&T office 10 blocks away, he said. By coincidence, in October 2003, Klein was transferred to that office and assigned to the Internet room. He asked a technician there about the secret room on the 6th floor, and the technician told him it was connected to the Internet room a floor above. The technician, who was about to retire, handed him some wiring diagrams.
Another document showed that the NSA installed in the room a semantic traffic analyzer made by Narus, which Klein said indicated that the NSA was doing content analysis.
Steve Bannerman, Narus's marketing vice president, said in an interview that the NarusInsight system is "the world's most powerful Internet traffic processing engine." He said it is used to detect worms, as well as to capture information to help authorities stop criminal activity. He said it can track a communication's origin and destination, as well as its content. He declined to comment on AT&T's use of the system.
Klein said he decided to go public after President Bush defended the NSA's surveillance program as limited to collecting phone calls between suspected terrorists overseas and people in the United States. Klein said the documents show that the scope was much broader.
Klein was last in Washington in 1969, to take part in an antiwar protest. Now, he said with a chuckle, he's here in a gray suit as a lobbyist