Holo Lukaloa
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11/8/2007 1:48:36 PM
Whistleblower discusses how US government spies on all internet and phone conversations
This is why they are fighting so hard to give telecom companies total immunity from lawsuits. I find the whole thing incredible and sad that it's being tolerated.
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OLBERMANN: In room 226 of the Dirkson (ph) Building in Washington tomorrow, the Senate Judiciary Committee will consider whether to protect some of America‘s most powerful corporate executives from the legal consequences of having spied on the rest of us in this country. In our third story tonight, an AT&T whistle-blower today told members of Congress much more than that is at stake with the secret crimes that took place at Room 641A of AT&T‘s Fulsome Street facility in San Francisco, and potentially at others throughout country. Specifically, retired 22 year AT&T technician Mark Klein says that despite Mr. Bush‘s claims, the U.S. government used AT&T‘s cooperation to spy not only on overseas communications, but to vacuum up virtually all of America‘s use of the Internet for years, email, Googling, web surfing, you name it, thanks to AT&T‘s secure rooms, like 641A in San Francisco, accessible only to those cleared by the NSA.
Klein obtaining AT&T schematics showing how the company used splitters to send secure room 641A a duplicate of every fiber-optic signal routed through its facilities. It involved not just AT&T customers, but virtually every Internet and telecommunications company, and virtually all email and web traffic in the country, without a warrant, without any mechanism for separating domestic from overseas, without separating suspect from citizen.
We welcome now former AT&T technician Mark Klein, whose documentation and claims are now part of a class action lawsuit against AT&T, one of 38 telecom spy lawsuits. AT&T so far declining to comment on the specifics of the allegations. Mr. Klein, great thanks for speaking out tonight.
MARK KLEIN, GOVERNMENT SPYING WHISTLE BLOWER: Thanks for inviting me.
OLBERMANN: The Senate is considering granting the telecom executives immunity. You lobbied Congress today not to do so. How come?
KLEIN: Well, if they give them immunity, it would probably shut down the lawsuit that I‘m a witness for, and then the American people won‘t find out what‘s really going on. And so that‘s why I‘m here to stop immunity. Congress should let the judicial process go forward.
OLBERMANN: Two parts here; first, can you explain to those of us that could use the Internet, but would not be able to tell the difference between its physical form and a box full of guitar strings, exactly what happened in that secure room or secret room 641A?
KLEIN: I don‘t know what goes on in the secret room, because I didn‘t have security clearance. But I know what went on outside, because my job - - I worked in the Internet room. My job was to connect circuits into the splitter device which was hard wired to the secret room. And effectively the splitter copied the entire data stream of those Internet cables into the secret room.
We are talking about phone conversations, email, web browsing, everything that goes across the Internet. And that device, the splitters, is a dumb device. It doesn‘t do any selection at all.
OLBERMANN: And the follow-up to that, as you mentioned, you didn‘t have the security, the NSA clearance. So give us an idea how you know all of this, in addition to your expertise as a technician.
KLEIN: As a technician, I had the engineering wiring documents, which told me how the splitter was wired to the secret room. So I had to know that in order to do my job. So I know that whatever went across those cables was copied. The entire data stream was copied into the secret room. The splitter device has no selective capability, just copies everything.
We are talking about domestic traffic, as well as international traffic. And that‘s what got me upset to begi
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