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.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
My name is Mark Klein. I used to be an AT&T technician for 22 years.
[Former AT&T Technician Mark Klein Speaks Out on Retroactive Immunity and Domestic Surveillance]
"What I figured out when I got there is that they were copying everything flowing across the internet cables, the major internet links between AT&T's network and other companies' networks."
"It struck me at the time that this was a massively unconstitutional, illegal operation."
"It affects not only AT&T's customers, but everybody because these links went to places link Sprint, Qwest, a whole bunch of other companies."
"And so they're basically tapping into the entire internet."
[But isn't the government only monitoring suspected terrorists and not ordinary Americans?]
"To perform what they say they want to do, which is look at international traffic, none of this makes any sense. These installations only make sense if they're doing a huge, massive domestic dragnet on everybody in the United States."
[Shouldn't the telecoms trust that the Bush administration's requests are legal?]
"These companies know very well what's legal and illegal. They've been dealing with this for decades. And it's a fact that Qwest refused the NSA's approaches because they didn't have, they weren't shown any legal justification for it. And they did the right thing and said, "no." "
"What I'm here for is it looked like a few weeks ago that the Senate bill which passed the Intelligence Committee would give immunity to the telecom companies and that would probably put an end to the lawsuits."
[The Senate Judiciary Committee is currently reviewing retroactive immunity]
"So I came here to lobby against giving immunity to the telecom companies. Let the court cases proceed and Congress should not interfere in that."
[Tell the Senate to oppose telecom immunity http://chrisdodd.com/immunity]
UPDATE:
You can watch my full interview with Mark Klein now on the DoddBlog.
Comments
Retroactive immunity would set a horrible and terrifying precedent.
The administration needs to be held accountable for their illegal activities, and giving all parties involved in the matter a pass erases any notions of accountability and the importance of the rule of law.
certainly a bad precedent, but in the ind who is really at fault here? The government is who initiated this process. If the telecoms are left open to being sued because they complied with an illegal government request, who do you think is going to get left holding the bill? Consumers.
Punish the government, not telecom customers.
I have a better idea... Punish the politicians, government employees and the corporations' leaders that broke the law with hard jail time. I don't mind paying for them to sit in jail. They are criminals.
I'm very interested. We travel quite often, have a son who is a journalist in Thailand and recently returned from a visit to friends in Cyprus. At the airport, our passports came up with some sort of question, and we had to follow an official to a down stairs room to have further examination. As it turned out, we waited for some minutes and then were given back our passports and told we could leave. I asked if we could know what prompted them to explore our record further. They refused to tell us and merely told us, " Don't worry, it's all in order." That didn't quite satisfy us. We have nothing to hide, but in this atmosphere, the situation takes on an uncomfortable sense of the presence of surveillance.
Dear Anon (above) -
Those who wrote the FISA law intended that AT&T, which then had a near-monopoly on long-distance lines, act in its own interest and report to the FISA Court any demands made by gov't agencies to carry out warrantless surveillance. The criminal and civil penalties built into the Act are the incentive to the telcos to enforce the Act.
The telcos later failed to act in their own self-interest, and should now pay. Let them go into bankruptcy and better management will take over their assets.
I think we are missing the point. The whole arguments is about restoring faith in the impartiality of justice: we cannot tollerate any corporation breaking the law, even if backed up by the government. Nobody should be above the law.
Thank you Mr. Klein! I am so grateful for all the people who could stay safely ensconced in good jobs but who choose to follow a higher calling.
1984 is here. But all is not lost. We must resist. We must continue to say what we have to say. The snooping is not against "terrorists". It has become aimed against domestic critics of the giant oligarchic kleptocracy now in place with the oil companies, war contracters etc. It is against the critics of the Bush/Cheney/Negroponte agenda. As Pogo says "We have met the enemy and it is us".
I for one will not take my Soma. I will not be lulled by anti-depressants, TV, shopping and numbing religious platitudes. I will not be controlled by fear. I will be fully conscious and responsible. I will stay informed and hold my elected officials responsible. I will live to honor Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and all the others who thought clearly and acted with courage.
Read on you dull unattractive snoop bureaucrats who are helping fascism creep in on little cat's feet. I am not afraid. You cannot silence us all. You cannot jail us all.
Sonia
Wow, Sonia!! Your words bring tears to my eyes, and hope into my heart! Thank you for speaking courageously.
Sonia,
I cannot express how amazed I was to read your post. It was as if I was reading what I have been feeling for some time. The anger and frustration at not seeing more outrage or open demonstration by the masses against these fear mongoring criminals. Reading your post has given me hope that I am not alone anymore. I LOVE your thinking and how well you expressed it. Since the Florida fiasco in 2000 and how the Supreme Court decided to crown this Jerk into office I have been weary. To see it again in 2004, and after Katrina, and the continuous grab for power by the VP is revolting and un-American. I wish I could exchange more thoughts with you.
I ditto what Sonia wrote on Nov. 7th regarding her stand to resist the corporate, political and economic interests who want to weaken this sovereign nation, to spend our treasury, to keep us at war, or drugged, or hypnotized by folly and falacious so-called news & entertainment. I, too, will take my life like my vitamins, straight and honest in order to keep my sixth sense intact and functioning well enough to know I am being trampled by greedy power-mad idiots who believe dogma and threats will win hearts and minds.
With possibly the worst administration in our history at the helm, why are we allowing our civil liberties and common sense measures to be eroded? Impeachment should not be off the table. We need to send a strong message before our country is irrevocably damaged, if it is not too late. Retroactive immunity should not be allowed. If private companies feared lawsuits then they would not participate in outrageous electronic surveillance programs.
Something that was not widely picked up is the fact that Ms. Pelosi was informed years ago about the illegal wiretaps and email interceptions while she was on the intelligence committee. Doesn't it make much more sense in explaining her refusal to put impeachment on the table and not at the top of our "To Do" list? She will not allow impeachment proceedings because she was in on the deal from the very start. Clever, clever Carl let her in on it knowing that her complicity in the crime would preclude her starting legal proceedings! If she tries to bust George and the rest they will take her down too. So we wait for a clean member of Congress to press the issue, like Dennis Kucinich. But now the media steps in and refuses to print or broadcast any information about his efforts to get the truth out. Chances are really very good that Hilary is in on it as well, otherwise there would be no Republicans hanging out with her like the Newt. She started as a Republican, remember? This isn't a game and it didn't just "happen". They have been quietly planning this coup for decades. Nixon was sloppy, Bush the First was better and now Carl has all his ducks in a row and all the personalities in place. Immunity for the guilty and secret prisons for the whistle blowers. Welcome to the New American Century.
The law says that the carriers can't divulge communications without a valid court order. That's not difficult. If the carriers don't demand warrants, then the government won't bother to get them, and then we're in big trouble -- as we are now.
Ultimately, even the best wiretap laws won't protect us against an administration, like this one, that just ignores any laws they find inconvenient. When anyone tries to hold them to account the courts will just show them the door under the "state secrets" privilege. (This is a judge-made privilege that appears nowhere in law or the Constitution; tell that to the right-wingers who complain so much about judicial activism!)
Our only meaningful defense is technical: encryption. We must encrypt as much as we possibly can, whether or not it's "sensitive". The bigger we can make the haystack that the NSA must search, the harder it will be for them to find its needles, like politically useful dirt on the Administration's critics.
Learn everything you can about encryption. Talk about it to your family and friends. Install it and use it, even just to talk about the weather. Fight back to protect your privacy with the only meaningful tool we have left.
Probably the easiest and most widely available encryption tool is Skype in its computer-to-computer mode (not SkypeIn or SkypeOut). Skype automatically encrypts everything, though because it's proprietary there is concern about possible "back doors". Still, it's better than nothing. For instant messaging on the Mac, use Adium (www.adiumx.com); it has encryption built in, but you have to enable it on each conversation. Email can be encrypted with GPG/PGP or S/MIME, a standard for encrypted email that's supported in Mozilla Thunderbird and other mail programs.
The following web pages are a few good places to start learning about encryption:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encryption
http://www.gnupg.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/MIME
Is Mark Brown going to testify before the House or the Senate? He needs to.
That's all fine and good. But, the NSA works for us. Why should we have to take special precautions to be protected from our watchdogs? Tale the dog to obedience class.
I think this issue has to be considered in the context of the Pentagon's plans to conduct war in cyberspace. Which suggests that what they are about is mapping cyber space in preparation for "taking out" the networks of supposed or suspected enemies.
When it becomes apparent to the rest of the world that their financial, industrial and commercial communications are not secure from espionage interests, the trust which fuels our economic relations will be destroyed. Already, Russia and China and Finland are making arrangements to set up separate systems.
The Bush/Cheney obsession with dominance is self-defeating. Unfortunately, it's ordinary Americans who are going to pay the price.
The Bush administration thinks that 'leaks' (Secret prisons, Secret, no warrent wire-tapping, etc.) is the major National Security issue and they can not use the FISA court? Why?
The logical conclusion is that they want 'blanket' coverage of all of the News Media - NYT, Washington post, NewsWeek and other US and Foreign publications. No FISA court would approve any such attacks on the free press. Is this the US today?
Hi, Monica -
Actually Russia and China (and a few other countries) never did buy-in to the Internet protocols and registration systems set up by the United States before 2000.
You are absolutely correct that the scandal that resulted from Bush-Cheney Administration's illegal domestic wiretapping has the potential to break up the international system that was established during the 1990s, and to eliminate the benefits that accrued to having the world's internet and cell phone registries controlled by U.S. entities. Yet another casualty of war and this regime's incompetent misdirection of it. See, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/5/26/11367/6684
Extract:
The Verint-Verisign partnership may go part of the way to explain why certain members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees are so eager to offer immunity to the very companies (and officials) that have been carrying out illegal mass wiretapping inside the U.S. The U.S. technical surveillance infrastructure and domain registries potentially inform multiple parties in several countries. Doubtless, some would rather the messy details of how this global web-based and cell surveillance system works in the real world don't come out in open court or in open Congressional hearings. It's not just the American telcos and the NSA which would like to see this whole thing go away.
This surveillance has both legitimate intelligence functions and completely illegal domestic monitoring functions. I believe the reason Bush did not go to the FISA court for its legal operations is because the illegal operations were at least as important to them, being part of pattern of institutional actions to further their political control through repression in the US.
See: http://www.nota.org/NSPD-51/NSPD-51NationalEmergency.htm about the potential risk of a Coup d'Etat by National Emergency.
Hats off to Senator Dodd for doing what so few in Congress are prepared to do: stand up to Bush on a matter of principle.
AND: Christopher Dodd, U.S. Senator from Connecticut wants a Moratorium on death penalty.
This guy is looking better all the time. Our world is changing thanks to real Patriots like Mr Dodd. Thank you sir.
this is what it looks like after the telefons finger you ...
http://www.freedomfchs.com/unwarranted_surveillance.pdf
http://www.freedomfchs.com/
Great video, Matt. Mark Klein is very convincing. I wish we had more courageous citizens like him.
Senator Dodd's planned filibuster of FISA with retroactive immunity is a wonderful step. It's still staggering that support for the Constitution and the rule of law would be an issue that would distinguish one Presidential candidate from the others.
I caught part of Senator Dodd's comments this afternoon on the Ed Schultz show. I was very happy to hear of his plans for streamlining VA support for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. The plan to provide GI Bill benefits to National Guard troops who have been "gamed" by the Republicans recently (where their tours were cut off, by as little as one day, in order to deny education benefits) was also refreshing.
Senator Dodd is getting it right on the big stuff that is making headlines and on the small stuff that will make our nation strong and fair again.
Many Thanks to Mark Klein, but this should come as no surprise to anyone. America's entire system of communications was permanently damaged with the advent of Cellphones, Microwave Towers, Palm PIlots, GPS and any other form of signal that is trackable. In December of 2005, Bush formally declared war upon the privacy of all American Citizens in the name of ferreting out both terrorists and sympathizers, both foreign and domestic. In doing this he was given a "blank check" by a complicit Congress that has totally failed to address the subversion of Rule of Law that was FISA 1978. It is a beginning sign of the end of Democracy when Federal Judges begin to resign their posts as they did two years ago next month, in protest to Bush's usurpation of power, and the pervasive complicity of all of our leaders is most apparent in Ms. Pelosi's first edict after the November 2006 "sea change" when she announced that "Impeachment was off the table." A year from now we will be faced with the choice of electing One of Sixteen current pretenders who will be No More effective in righting the Ship of State than the Reprobate we have now, but Hopefully he or she will Have at Least Some Sense of Decency in Redirecting our Nations Priorities toward War's end and Focus on Solutions to Domestic Problems rather than Chase the Impossible Dream of "Global Democracy" from peoples and religions that simply don't want it in the First Place. God Bless and Save America and the United States Consitution.
WE the people for the people words used by our founding fathers of America these words are soon to be a thing of the distant past. The comander in chief has a motto too it's "We the people" hell no I say "screw the PEOPLE"!!! We need to bring America to the people of this country. How can we do that? We can start by supporting senator Dodds bid for President He has clearly shown the people of this country dedication,service and trust. It's our turn to help ourselves so come election day there is only one solution VOTE Chris Dodd in for President of the United States.
Respectfully
Nate Sutera
N.D.C.A
CT State Representative
Thank you Mr Dodd and friends!!
We are honered that someone cares and is standing up for us!!
We also respect the fact that you can not do this alone!!
and it is time we did are part!!
everone must call a spade a spade and spread the word.
ignorace got us here and ignorance will destroy us all!!
I had you pegged wrong, Senator Dodd. I thought you were just another one of the crowd. The more I learn about you and your efforts to restore American democracy, the more impressed I become. Thank you for raising this issue.
Now, someone please explain to me the reports I have read about the Bush administration using ILLEGAL WIRETAPS prior to 9-11. The whole war on terror was started AFTER 9-11, so why was FISA being ignored BEFORE 9-11?
I have two questions on this topic.
First is - what can I do? I've wrote to both my senator and my state rep to ask that this totalitarian cr@p be stoped. What is the next step?
Second is - where are all the arrests a system like this should be generating? If they really are watching everything that everyone does there would suddenly be tens of thousands of arrests for a multitude of offences. Think of all the BS that is going on in the internet! Every phisher, zombie bot farmer, tech savvy dope dealer, bank account cracking script kiddie, etc, etc, etc would be loaded into a paddy wagon and hauled away to some gulag. I don't recall reading about ANY arrests at all from something like this. When it's in the news what I see is 'so and so was stupid and walked right into an obvious sting after drawing lots of attention to himself'. If you have news accounts of mass arrests that were issued warrents based on tips from the 1984 Big Brother please post them?
Why do we, the people, have to keep reminding law-makers to uphold the law?
Sonia seems popular. I never worked in telecommunications, but you ever wonder who Dodd worked for when he was in Peace Corps? Maybe CIA? There were no five year(IIPA) counter intelligence laws when he was in Vietnam or while he was in the army, maybe, NSA? Plame's dad was NSA, Air Force. Joe's dad was a 'diplomat' in Spain where he grew up.
I want to buy a new cell phone, but they have voip phones in Europe now, so maybe I'll wait until they come out! Noel, Merry Christmas sales!!!!!!!!!!
Is Sen.Dodd for real when I heard him say: "The first thing I will do when I'm sworn in as President is restore the Constitution."???????????????
First, thank you Mr. Klein for your courageous act. You give me some much-needed hope.
Second, it is the sworn duty of everyone who works in the Executive branch of the government to at all times obey the laws and Constitution of the United States. It is the sworn duty of everyone who works in the Legislative and Judicial branches to stop a member of the Executive branch who does not, up to and especially the President, Vice-President, and Attorney General.
It is the sworn duty of all members of Congress to impeach and to bring criminal charges, not grant immunity. Warrantless spying is illegal, as is imprisonment without charges, representation and fair trial. Torture is not only illegal, it is ineffective and deeply repugnant.
The easiest way to remove a democracy is to replace it with something that looks like a democracy but isn't.
Senator Dodd, you have urgent work to do.
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The illegal tapping of our phones and other communications is just a tiny snippet of what's going on. If you're looking for a little education, I highly recommend the book "Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein. It is the best book I've ever read. People, PLEASE wake up!
"We live in the United States of Amnesia" - Gore Vidal