AT&T whistleblower: say no to telecom immunity

[sabra]

Source: statesman

A telecommunications technician who says he witnessed the telecom giant AT&T secretly help the government with its eavesdropping program plans to tell all at a news conference tomorrow on Capitol Hill.

Mark Klein wants the Senate Judiciary committee to reject legislation that offers telecommuncations companies legal protection for participating in President Bush’s surveillance program without a court warrant. The Senate Intelligence Committee recently cleared such legislation. On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will evaluate the measure.

Klein is a witness in a class-action lawsuit brought against AT&T by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group based in San Francisco. The foundation alleges that the telcom company aided the government in illegally spying on Americans outside the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

“My job required me to enable the physical connections between AT&T customers’ internet communications and the National Security Agency’s illegal, wholesale copying machine for domestic emails, internet phone conversations, web surfing and all other Internet traffic,” Klein said in a statement.

...

Klein was responsible for connecting high-speed fiber optic cables to sophisticated equipment that intercepted communications from AT&T customers and then copied and routed every single one to a room run by the National Security Agency.

Read more: http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-blogs/washington/secrecy/entries/2007/11/06/att_whistleblower_say_no_to_te.html

[kimmylavin]

1. Jeez.

I hope Mr. Klein has incredible security up until tomorrow...

[Acadia Blue]

2. Brave guy. Remember Paul Wellstone? Anyone who crosses W

could have an accident. Good Nazi methods work well.

[Occulus]

3. I find interesting the absolute dearth of

people commenting on this and other threads related to this subject who all used to say things like, "there's no way the NSA has enough space to store everything..."

Well, golly gee. Turns out the pressed aluminum haberdashers were right about this one. Imagine that!

[Judi Lynn]

4. Former Technician 'Turning In' AT&T Over NSA Program

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.

A year or so later, he stumbled upon documents that, he said, nearly caused him to fall out of his chair. The documents, he said, show that the NSA gained access to massive amounts of e-mail and search and other Internet records of more than a dozen global and regional telecommunications providers. AT&T allowed the agency to hook into its network at a facility in San Francisco and, according to Klein, many of the other telecom companies probably knew nothing about it.

Klein is in Washington this week to share his story in the hope that it will persuade lawmakers not to grant legal immunity to telecommunications firms that helped the government in its anti-terrorism efforts.

More:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/07/AR2007110700006.html

[Kaleko]

5. Fantastic. It's all unraveling... this whole, hopelessly corrupt mess

will be exposed eventually.

[flyarm]

6. K&R

[tiptoe]

7. K & R !

[pinniped]

8. Those congrassholes were messing with yahoo and look at this shit.

What does Lantos have to say about this?

Moral pygmies.

Bastards.