After several weeks of wrangling, the Senate Judiciary Committee will consider a revised FISA bill today, including the much-discussed provision that provides retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that illegally cooperated with the NSA on warrantless domestic searches.
Perhaps the most notable player in the debate has turned out to be a retired AT&T technician most of us have never heard of: Mark Klein. It was Klein who came forward in 2005 with first-hand evidence that AT&T had allowed the NSA to use its San Francisco facilities to capture millions of phone and email communications without a warrant. As of this week, Klein’s perspective is front and center.
In an interview yesterday, he alleged that the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T. Contrary to the government’s depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists, Klein said, much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic. Klein said he believes that the NSA was analyzing the records for usage patterns as well as for content. […]
One of Klein’s documents listed links to 16 entities, including Global Crossing, a large provider of voice and data services in the United States and abroad; UUNet, a large Internet provider in Northern Virginia now owned by Verizon; Level 3 Communications, which provides local, long-distance and data transmission in the United States and overseas; and more familiar names such as Sprint and Qwest. It also included data exchanges MAE-West and PAIX, or Palo Alto Internet Exchange, facilities where telecom carriers hand off Internet traffic to each other.
“I flipped out,” he said. “They’re copying the whole Internet. There’s no selection going on here. Maybe they select out later, but at the point of handoff to the government, they get everything.” (emphasis added)
Klein described the efforts between the Bush administration and the telecoms as “massively illegal and unconstitutional.” He’s heard all the talking points on behalf of immunity, and he’s carefully explained why they’re all wrong.
Spencer Ackerman talked to Klein yesterday.
Klein explained why he traveled all the way from San Francisco to lobby Senators about the issue: if the immunity provision passes, Americans may never know how extensive the surveillance program was — or how deeply their privacy may have been invaded.
“The president has not presented this truthfully,” said Klein, a 62-year old retiree. “He said it was about a few people making calls to the Mideast. But I know this physical equipment. It copies everything. There’s no selection of anything, at all — the splitter copies entire data streams from the internet, phone conversations, e-mail, web-browsing. Everything.”
Klein also chatted with Chris Dodd’s team, and explained that the administration’s efforts affected “everybody,” not just AT&T customers, because “they were copying everything flowing across the internet cables, the major internet links between AT&T’s network and other companies’ networks.”
Asked if the government was only targeting suspected terrorists, Klein added, “To perform what they say they want to do, which is look at international traffic, none of this makes any sense. These installations only make sense if they’re doing a huge, massive domestic dragnet on everybody in the United States.”
If senators disregard Klein’s first-hand knowledge, and approve retroactive immunity, the extent of the surveillance program will remain a mystery, and Americans seeking their day in court will be denied justice.
We’ll have a far better sense of how this will unfold later today. Stay tuned.