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Former AT&T technician Mark Klein is the key witness in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s class-action lawsuit against the company, which alleges that AT&T illegally cooperated in an illegal National Security Agency domestic-surveillance program.

In this recently surfaced statement, Klein details his discovery of an alleged surveillance operation in an AT&T office in San Francisco, and offers his interpretation of company documents that he believes support his case.

For its part, AT&T is asking a federal judge to keep those documents out of court, and to order the EFF to return them to the company.

“Here Wired News presents Klein’s statement in its entirety:

AT&T’s Implementation of NSA Spying on American Citizens
–31 December 2005
I wrote the following document in 2004 when it became clear to me that AT&T, at the behest of the National Security Agency, had illegally installed secret computer gear designed to spy on internet traffic. At the time I thought this was an outgrowth of the notorious Total Information Awareness program which was attacked by defenders of civil liberties. But now it’s been revealed by The New York Times that the spying program is vastly bigger and was directly authorized by President Bush, as he himself has now admitted, in flagrant violation of specific statutes and constitutional protections for civil liberties. I am presenting this information to facilitate the dismantling of this dangerous Orwellian project.

AT&T Deploys Government Spy Gear on WorldNet Network
– 16 January, 2004
In 2003 AT&T built “secret rooms” hidden deep in the bowels of its central offices in various cities, housing computer gear for a government spy operation which taps into the company’s popular WorldNet service and the entire internet. These installations enable the government to look at every individual message on the internet and analyze exactly what people are doing. Documents showing the hardwire installation in San Francisco suggest that there are similar locations being installed in numerous other cities.

(photo credit: Chris Becker)

The physical arrangement, the timing of its construction, the government-imposed secrecy surrounding it, and other factors all strongly suggest that its origins are rooted in the Defense Department’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) program which brought forth vigorous protests from defenders of constitutionally protected civil liberties

The equipment that technician Mark Klein learned was installed in the National Security Agency’s “secret room” inside AT&T’s San Francisco switching office isn’t some sinister Big Brother box designed solely to help governments eavesdrop on citizens’ internet communications.

Rather, it’s a powerful commercial network-analysis product with all sorts of valuable uses for network operators. It just happens to be capable of doing things that make it one of the best internet spy tools around.”

“Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record,” says Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of Narus, a Mountain View, California, company. “We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls.”

Former AT&T technician Mark Klein and internet expert Brian Reid describe an NSA listening room that Klein discovered while working at the company’s operations center. In “Spying on the Home Front” FRONTLINE talks to intelligence insiders and asks: Is the Bush administration’s domestic war on terrorism jeopardizing our civil liberties?

Nightline featured a story about former AT&T technician and whistleblower Mark Klein. While working at AT&T headquarters in San Francisco, Klein discovered (and had the courage to speak out about) a secret eavesdropping room that all of the company’s traffic was routed through. With the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mr. Klein went public back in April 2006, but alleges John Negroponte and Michael Hayden pressured the LA Times to kill the story.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T on January 31, 2006, accusing the telecom giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in its massive, illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans’ communications. In May, 2006, many other cases were filed against a variety of telecommunications companies. Subsequently the Multi-District Litigation Panel of the federal courts transferred approximately 40 cases to the Northern District of California federal court.

For information about specific cases or categories of cases that are still pending, follow the links below:

• Hepting v. AT&T
• Al Haramain v. Bush
• Cases against Verizon/MCI
• Center for Constitutional Rights v. Bush
• Shubert v. Bush
• State Administrator cases

Please leave your comments, thoughts, and links to other articles discussing NSA’s illegal tapping of the internet. If you have issue that needs exposure, or you would like to promote your political beliefs and persona, take a look at our Electronic Grass Roots / Political SEO page.

(Sources: Wired.com and EFF.org)

Tags: AT&T Spying, ATT VS EFF, Government Spying, Internet Spying, NSA Spying, Political Marketing, Political SEO

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