ATT, Mark Klein, and "national security" as an arm of Cosa Nostra

NPR: This week, Congress is considering changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).  Among other things, the bill would grant immunity to the telephone companies that helped the National Security Agency (NSA) intercept phone calls and emails after 9/11.  There are several lawsuits challenging the legality of what the phone companies did.  A key witness against ATT is Mark Klein.  He was the technician at ATT in San Francisco who came forward in 2006 with information about how the company had helped the NSA.  He has retired now, and he's in Washington to urge Congress not to grant the telecoms immunity.  ... First of all, Mark Klein, take us back to 2003.  What did you learn about what was happening at ATT and how did you learn it? 

Mark Klein:  Well, just to step back a bit -- I had a hint that the NSA was doing something in 2002 when an agent of theirs arrived at our office to interview a management technician for a secret job.  Of course we didn't know what it was about.   But gradually over the weeks, we found out that they were building a secret installation at Folsom Street, which is the final office I arrived at. 

NPR:  And the specifics were?

Mark Klein:  I was assigned to the internet room and I had my hands on the equipment and the fiber optic cables, and I had documents showing how things were wired up.  I discovered that they had tapped into the main fiber optic cables which carry all the internet traffic going through the office.  I found that the traffic was being copied in its entirety to the secret room.

NPR:  Its entirety. To give us some sense of the volume of information covered, what are you talking about?

Mark Klein: The biggest of these fiber optic cables carries 2.5 gigabits per second which amounts to about a quarter of an Encyclopedia Brittanica every second. 

NPR:  And all of that was being copied from ATT's facility, a copy going straight to NSA.

Mark Klein:  Right.  That was one of the things that bothered me right off the bat.  I should say, by the way, it's not just ATT's traffic going through these cables because these cables connect ATT's  network with other network like Sprint, Qwest, Global Crossing, UUNet, and so forth.  What bothered me was that the physical set up was these cables went through what they call a splitter.  The splitter is a very dumb device and it just copies the entire data stream without any selection going on.  So it's a complete copy of the data stream.

NPR: And you were bothered by this?

Mark Klein:  Yes.  It didn't seem to me to be legal or constitutional for the government to just grab everything.  My understanding of a legal warrant is that the warrant has to be specific.  This was not the old-style warrant where they come in and they ask for a tap on one person's phone line, this was a tap on the entire internet. 

NPR: Some would say, people who favor telecom immunity, maybe the NSA exceeded its brief, maybe not, but it was NSA that was doing it,  not the telephone companies.

Mark Klein:  Well, the NSA came in and asked for these companies to do something which they had to know was illegal.  They had decades of experience in wiretapping.  They had to know that this request was massively illegal.  The fact that Qwest the request of the NSA for this kind of stuff...

NPR: ... so far as we know, the only telephone company that did...

Mark Klein: ...Qwest turned it down because they didn't think there was any documentation that it was legal.  And they did the right thing.  So that indicated the others did something a lot less than what Qwest did:  they didn't look for the legal documentation.

NPR:  In your view, should the telephone companies help the government at all in these instances?

Mark Klein: Well, I can understand an emergency where life and limb might be in danger, but this isn't any longer an emergency, this has been going on for six years now -- it's a permanent installation. 

NPR:  What do you make of the argument that in order to do what people describe as "data mining," you get that massive amount of internet and email traffic and then, once the computer without seeing the content of barely anything that's in there finds a few patterns that are interesting... then you can look at those, and technically that's the way you'd have a narrowed search.

Mark Klein: One of the things I discovered in the documents I looked at was the list of equipment they're using.  One of them is odd to be in a telecommunications office.  It's called a NARUS STA-6400.  "STA" stands for "semantic traffic analyzer."  It looks at content.  It doesn't just look at addresses and where it's coming from and where it's going to or do pattern analysis.  It looks at content and selects out on the basis of content. 

NPR:  The secret room that you lent out in San Francisco -- was it unique, to your knowledge, at ATT?

Mark Klein:  No.  I learned in the process of looking at this that there are similar NSA installations in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, Seattle.  And the documents mention Atlanta.  After looking at the documents...

NPR: ... The documents are from ATT...

Mark Klein:   ...ATT documents... that they probably have 15 to 20 across the country. 

NPR: Dozens of of people who work for ATT you say could describe just what you saw in San Francisco.

Mark Klein: That's right.  But you want to think twice or three times before you go out by yourself up against a big corporation.  Plus the federal government! 

NPR:   You thought twice or three times!

Mark Klein: Yes, of course!

NPR: What did you think about? What was that process like, deciding...

Mark Klein: Well, I was thinking if I want to do this, I want to have some allies on my side, and who would I go to, and would media believe me if I walked in the door of the New York Times, who am I?  Right?  Who would believe me?  I thought the situation was better when the New York Times revealed part of it, because that gave me somewhat more credibility.

NPR: They revealed it without talking to you?

Mark Klein: Without talking to me.  I had no connection to that initial story.  But the point is that they made it more believable that there was some illegal government surveillance program going on.

NPR:  What's for you, or, as you would say, what's for all of us riding on the lawsuits against the telephone companies?

Mark Klein:  For the American people, it generally has not sunk in how broad and how deep the surveillance is.  The White House has repeatedly and often successfully tried to portray this as just a very small, narrow program focused on a handful of bad people who were making phone calls to the Middle East.  And what's really going on -- and the nature of the equipment -- is, they're looking at millions of Americans' communications, domestic communications.  That's a whole nother kettle of fish.  And not constitutional.

[NPR also called ATT for a statement.  "ATT is fully committed to protecting our customers' privacy.  We do not comment on matters of national security."]

More about Mark Klein here.