A Story of Surveillance

Eugen Leitl eugen at leitl.org
Wed Nov 7 13:11:39 PST 2007


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/07/AR2007110700006_pf.html

A Story of Surveillance

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

By Ellen Nakashima

Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, November 7, 2007; 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.

The plain-spoken, bespectacled Klein, 62, said he may be the only person in
the country in a position to discuss firsthand knowledge of an important
aspect of the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program. He is
retired, so he isn't worried about losing his job. He did not have security
clearance, and the documents in his possession were not classified, he said.
He has no qualms about "turning in," as he put it, the company where he
worked for 22 years until he retired in 2004.

"If they've done something massively illegal and unconstitutional -- well,
they should suffer the consequences," Klein said. "It's not my place to feel
bad for them. They made their bed, they have to lie in it. The ones who did
[anything wrong], you can be sure, are high up in the company. Not the
average Joes, who I enjoyed working with."

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.

He said the NSA built a special room to receive data streamed through an AT&T
Internet room containing "peering links," or major connections to other
telecom providers. The largest of the links delivered 2.5 gigabits of data --
the equivalent of one-quarter of the Encyclopedia Britannica's text -- per
second, said Klein, whose documents and eyewitness account form the basis of
one of the first lawsuits filed against the telecom giants after the
government's warrantless-surveillance program was reported in the New York
Times in December 2005.

Claudia Jones, an AT&T spokeswoman, said she had no comment on Klein's
allegations. "AT&T is fully committed to protecting our customers' privacy.
We do not comment on matters of national security," she said.

The NSA and the White House also declined comment on Klein's allegations.

Klein is urging Congress not to block Hepting v. AT&T, a class-action
suit pending in federal court in San Francisco, as well as 37 other lawsuits
charging carriers with illegally collaborating with the NSA. He was
accompanied yesterday by lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
which filed Hepting v. AT&T in 2006. Together, they are urging key U.S.
senators to oppose a pending White House-endorsed immunity provision that
would effectively wipe out the lawsuits. The Judiciary Committee is expected
to take up the measure Thursday.

In summer 2002, Klein was working in an office responsible for Internet
equipment when an NSA representative arrived to interview a management-level
technician for a special job whose details were secret.

"That's when my antennas started to go up," he said. He knew that the NSA was
supposed to work on overseas signals intelligence.

The job entailed building a "secret room" in an AT&T office 10 blocks away,
he said. By coincidence, in October 2003, Klein was transferred to that
office and assigned to the Internet room. He asked a technician there about
the secret room on the 6th floor, and the technician told him it was
connected to the Internet room a floor above. The technician, who was about
to retire, handed him some wiring diagrams.

"That was my 'aha!' moment," Klein said. "They're sending the entire Internet
to the secret room."

The diagram showed splitters, glass prisms that split signals from each
network into two identical copies. One fed into the secret room, the other
proceeded to its destination, he said.

"This splitter was sweeping up everything, vacuum-cleaner-style," he said.
"The NSA is getting everything. These are major pipes that carry not just
AT&T's customers but everybody's."

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."

Qwest has not been sued because of media reports last year that said the
company declined to participate in an NSA program to build a database of
domestic phone-call records out of concern about its legality. What the
documents show, Klein contends, is that the NSA apparently was collecting
several carriers' communications, probably without their consent.

Another document showed that the NSA installed in the room a semantic traffic
analyzer made by Narus, which Klein said indicated that the NSA was doing
content analysis.

Steve Bannerman, Narus's marketing vice president, said in an interview that
the NarusInsight system is "the world's most powerful Internet traffic
processing engine." He said it is used to detect worms, as well as to capture
information to help authorities stop criminal activity. He said it can track
a communication's origin and destination, as well as its content. He declined
to comment on AT&T's use of the system.

Klein said he decided to go public after President Bush defended the NSA's
surveillance program as limited to collecting phone calls between suspected
terrorists overseas and people in the United States. Klein said the documents
show that the scope was much broader.

Klein was last in Washington in 1969, to take part in an antiwar protest.
Now, he said with a chuckle, he's here in a gray suit as a lobbyist.

Staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this story.





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