black…MYstory

I was watching Countdown with Keith Olbermann last night and he interviewed Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician. In that interview, Klein shared something that should be of grave concern to Americans that suspect that they are being spied on and don’t like the notion.

A while back, Bush had to admit that he was illegally using the NSA to spy on Americans. However, not being able to completely tell the truth, Bush told the American people that he was only spying on Americans who were contacting people internationally, with specific interest to contact to parties in the Middle East.

However, if what Klein is saying is true, this directly contradicts what President Bush is professing. According to Klein, the government, with AT&T’s cooperation, copied all internet data that flowed through AT&T’s network.

This interview followed a Capitol Hill press conference in which Klein was a participant. In his statements, Klein spoke of a secret rooms in AT&T’s San Francisco offices, as well as other AT&T locations, containing the equipment the NSA would need to copy off the data. While Klein was never allowed in the room, he was responsible for installing the “splitter” that would allow for the data to stream to two places simultaneously, one-half that was hard-wired directly into this secret room.

Consider some of what he alleges:

He said that as an AT&T technician overseeing Internet operations in San Francisco, he helped maintain optical splitters that diverted data en route to and from AT&T customers.

One day he found that the splitters were hard-wired into a secret room on the sixth floor.

Klein said only a management-level employee with NSA security clearance was allowed inside, but documents he obtained form AT&T showed that highly sophisticated data mining equipment was kept there.

Conversations he had with other technicians and the AT&T documents led Klein to believe there are 15 to 20 such sites nationwide, including in Seattle, Los Angeles, San Jose, San Diego and Atlanta, he said.

Now, understand this. This meant that, without a warrant or even a reason to suspect those they were spying on, phone (voice-over-internet), internet, email, etc. traffic were being captured. Furthermore, since a good portion of traffic goes over AT&T’s network, you didn’t even have to be an AT&T customer to have your information captured.

All this comes on the heels of Congress considering whether or not to grant retroactive immunity to companies who participated in these illegal measures.

I say no to immunity and let the chips fall where they may for this people who violated the law and the Constitution to spy on Americans.

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