How a retired technician handed EFF the proof of NSA mass spying
by Ellsworth Toohey · Boing BoingOn the sixth floor of an AT&T building on Folsom Street in San Francisco, a locked room labeled 641A held the hardware that gave the NSA a copy of every byte of internet traffic passing through. The man who figured this out was a retired AT&T technician named Mark Klein, and in January 2006 he walked into the lobby of the Electronic Frontier Foundation a few blocks away and started talking. Cindy Cohn, then EFF's legal director, recounts the encounter in The MIT Press Reader, in an excerpt from her book Privacy's Defender.
Klein told EFF's executive director Shari Steele that he could prove the NSA was tapping the internet backbone at scale. Since 2003, he had run the seventh-floor room on Folsom Street where AT&T's fiber-optic backbone connected to the wider internet. Those cables also ran a flight down, into 641A — a room only employees with NSA security clearances could enter.
Beside the secret room sat a splitter cabinet. Every fiber coming off the seventh floor was duplicated: one strand carried the traffic on its way, the other dumped a full copy into 641A. The mirroring added no measurable lag and left no fingerprint. Klein called the rig the Big Brother machine. A telecom expert EFF brought in to vet the documents said, "This isn't a wiretap, it's a country tap."
After EFF filed Klein's evidence, a Justice Department lawyer phoned Cohn to insist the documents be hand-carried to a SCIF a few blocks away, because a "very slow but very secure fax machine" sat inside that vault and could feed the pages one at a time to DC. Cohn had suggested emailing, using regular fax, or shipping the originals via FedEx.
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