The Whistleblower Who Uncovered the NSA’s ‘Big Brother Machine’
An unexpected visitor gave my team the evidence we needed to prove that the government was secretly wiretapping Americans.
By: Cindy Cohn, Listen to this article
On January 20, 2006, the front doorbell rang at the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s offices on Shotwell Street in the Mission District of San Francisco. At the time, Shotwell Street wasn’t the glamorous part of the Mission. Our offices sat between two auto repair shops, across the street from a utility substation. The sidewalk was often dotted with homeless people’s tents. At one point, San Francisco did a survey, and our block of Shotwell Street had the highest reported amount of human feces in the whole city.
We had many people down on their luck ring that doorbell. Some were just lost. Others sought us out because they believed, quite sincerely, that the government or aliens had put a chip or magnet in their brains. We tried to be sympathetic and point them to other resources, but generally we had to turn them away.
Because of this, it was with friendliness but some caution that our executive director, Shari Steele, answered the bell.
“Do you folks care about privacy?” the guy asked. He was in a tan trench coat, looked to be in his early 60s, with gray hair, intense eyes, and a raspy voice.
“Why yes, we do,” Shari answered.
“Then I have some information for you. I am a retired AT&T technician. I know how the NSA is tapping into the internet at an AT&T facility downtown.”
“Well, come on in.”
Shari found EFF attorney Kevin Bankston in his tiny office. They talked for a long time. After the man left, Kevin and Lee Tien, another EFF attorney, burst into my office.
“This guy named Mark Klein, who just came to the door, has something,” Kevin said, with more excitement than I had seen from him in a long time. I was immediately intrigued, but what they told me blew past my highest expectations.
Mark had presented us with unequivocal evidence that the National Security Agency was engaged in mass, untargeted spying in the U.S. by tapping into the internet backbone. And it was doing this from an AT&T building just a short distance from our offices.
The backstory to Mark knocking on EFF’s door starts in 2001 with the government’s response to the horrific 9/11 attacks. The first of these was the Patriot Act.
In the seven weeks between its introduction and passage in 2001, Lee and I stayed up countless nights trying to parse the three-inch-thick printout of the proposed legislation to identify the sections that affected the internet. We needed to understand what laws the government wanted to change, spot overreach and unconstitutionality, and marshal appropriate support or resistance where necessary.
The draft legislation had been rolled out so quickly that we had the impression it was just sitting in an envelope on someone’s desk, with a note that read, “Open at the next crisis.” Our theory was confirmed when we saw that a good chunk of the proposed law was nearly the same package of legal changes that the FBI had tried — and failed — to push after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.
One big change impacting surveillance was clear: Prior to September 11, the U.S. had what could reasonably be called a “wall” separating foreign surveillance for national security purposes done by the NSA from domestic surveillance for law enforcement purposes done by the FBI. The theory was that those powers would never be turned on in the U.S. and used against its own people. The Patriot Act, however, helped erode that wall.
“Do you folks care about privacy?”
Soon, folks at EFF started to hear whispers of mass domestic surveillance programs. We were told confidentially that the NSA was gathering all the telephone records from America’s leading telecommunications companies. We separately heard that the NSA was now sitting on the wire in the U.S. We even heard that the agency was collecting metadata on our online activities from both telecommunications companies and some internet companies. Friends in the industry would say things like, “You wouldn’t believe what the NSA is doing in the United States now,” and “I can’t tell you anything without getting in trouble, but it’s massive.”
All sounded wildly illegal under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the Patriot Act. Several people reached out to us, and each time we sat down with them to see if we had enough provable facts to bring a case. But no one who reached out to talk to us was willing to go on the record, much less provide documentary evidence we could use in court.
Continue/Read Original Article: The Whistleblower Who Uncovered the NSA’s ‘Big Brother Machine’ | The MIT Press Reader
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