Wiring up Big Brother ... and fight: On the death of whistleblower Mark Klein

It has now been announced that the US whistleblower Mark Klein has died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 79. He worked as a technician for the telephone company AT&T and its subsidiaries for 22 years. In June 2006, he described under oath in a trial how AT&T had a high-security room 641A installed in a building in San Francisco, to which only security-cleared employees of the National Security Agency (NSA) had access. Klein himself had to install fiber optic splitters and lay the branched lines to room 641A. This was the first time it was publicly established that the NSA was also eavesdropping on the data of US citizens and was by no means only concerned with "foreign terrorists", as US President G.W. Bush announced in December 2005 following an initial report in the New York Times.

Mark Klein worked at various locations for AT&T until he retired in 2004. Most recently, he worked as one of six service technicians in an AT&T building in San Francisco, from which the AT&T WorldNet connections to the Pacific region as well as to US Internet peering nodes such as MAE-West and PAIX ran. It wasn't until he read the New York Times article that he realized what the "cut-in and test procedure" was all about, which he sometimes had to perform. A fiber optic line was mirrored with a splitter and routed to the specially secured room 641A, which was under the supervision of the NSA.

Basis for EFF lawsuit

Klein turned to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and disclosed his knowledge. Lawyers for the EFF then sued AT&T, accusing the company of passing on its customers' Internet data traffic to the NSA using a surveillance program called "Dragnet". In doing so, it had violated the US Constitution. Klein testified as a witness under oath in these proceedings (PDF file). His testimony in turn led to the world learning about a machine called "Narus STA 6400". STA stands for Semantic Traffic Analyzer. Later, former NSA employee William Binney confirmed that AT&T also provided rooms similar to 641A in other US cities for the NSA.

The lawsuit against AT&T was dismissed in 2009 under the FISA Amendment Act of 2008. This law granted telecommunications companies retroactive immunity when they cooperate with government intelligence agencies. Mark Klein, together with NSA specialist James Bamford, wrote the book " Wiring up the Big Brother Machine ... And Fighting it." Klein received the EFF's Pioneer Award back in 2008.

(mma)