Chris Dodd for President

Thank you. My friends, not far from here stands a building located at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco.

I am sure that address is familiar to some of you. In fact, it is precisely 35.7 miles from the spot on which I am standing.

"Google Maps."

A few years ago, an Internet technician in that building named Mark Klein received an email that informed him someone from the National Security Agency would be visiting.

Indeed, it was Mark Klein who opened the door to let the gentleman in when that day came a short while later.

Not long after, he and a co-worker discovered something unprecedented - a switch that channeled Internet traffic culled from millions of living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens and offices across the nation to secret room operated by the NSA. There, that information was collected and processed ostensibly for the purposes of defending the nation.

Was the handover of this information necessary for national security? We have no idea - with very few exceptions, Congress is as much in the dark as the public.

And I believe one would be hard-pressed to understand why our government would need a copy of all Internet traffic to keep us safe.

That we know this happened is not because the government told us - they say the matter is classified.

Not because AT&T told us - they say they are forbidden by law from doing so.

Indeed, we may not have known any of this at all were it not for Mr. Klein, a 22-year veteran of AT&T who was old enough to remember when a law was passed to prevent this very sort of thing from happening in the first place. A law that was expressly written to give the government the tools it needed to defend the country.

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This is the full video from my interview with Mark Klein, the AT&T whistleblower who revealed the existence of secret NSA rooms at AT&T facilities that were being used to divert internet traffic. The video we posted yesterday pulled quotes from Klein in this interview.

Yesterday afternoon I sat down with AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein. He’s the technician who revealed that the NSA has secret rooms for sweeping up massive amounts of electronic communications on the internet.

Klein is calling on the Senate to not grant telecommunications companies retroactive immunity. He's also testifying to the scale of the Bush administration's electronic surveillance:

"Everything you could imagine you use the internet for flows through these cables. It's not only international traffic, but a huge amount of domestic traffic too."

Watch the video of Klein talking about why he opposes retroactive immunity.