AT&T Whistleblower Urges Against Immunity for Telecoms in Bush Spy Program

The Senate is expected to vote on a controversial measure to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act tomorrow. The legislation would rewrite the nation’s surveillance laws and authorize the National Security Agency’s secret program of warrantless wiretapping.

AMY GOODMAN: The Senate is expected to vote on a controversial measure to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, tomorrow. The legislation would rewrite the nation’s surveillance laws and authorize the National Security Agency’s secret program of warrantless wiretapping. It gives the government new powers to eavesdrop on both domestic and international communications and could also grant immunity to phone companies involved in President Bush’s secret domestic spy program. The Democratic-controlled House approved its version of the bill late last month.

Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, speaking on Democracy Now!, called the measure “one of the greatest intrusions, potentially, on the rights of Americans protected under the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution in the history of our country.”

I’m joined right now by a man who blew the whistle on the involvement of phone companies in the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program. Mark Klein was a technician with AT&T for twenty-two years. In 2006, he leaked internal AT&T documents that revealed the company had set up a secret room in its San Francisco office to give the National Security Agency access to its fiber optic internet cables. He testified before Congress last November to urge lawmakers not to give A&T and other telecom companies immunity.

Mark Klein is also a witness in a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which alleges AT&T illegally gave the National Security Agency access to its networks. Mark Klein joins us now from San Francisco, California.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

MARK KLEIN: Thank you. Good morning, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s very good have you with us. This is highly controversial, the vote that is expected to take place tomorrow, especially Senator Obama’s role in it. But let’s go back to the beginning, Mark Klein. Talk about how you found out about AT&T spying on Americans.

MARK KLEIN: Right. I first should add a correction: Congress never invited me to testify, although I did go to Washington to lobby, but no committee has ever invited me to testify, which says something about Congress.

But going back to 2002, we were told one day in late 2002 that an NSA representative was coming to the office to speak to a certain management technician about a special job. And this turned out to be installing a secret room in the next office I was going to be in the following year. And that secret room involved a lot of spying equipment. Only this one management technician could go in there, and the regular union technicians were not allowed to go in there.

But when—in 2003 I was assigned to that office, and I got hold of the documents which were available—they’re not classified—and the documents showed what they were doing. They were basically copying the entire data stream going across critical internet cables and copying the entire data stream to this secret room, so the NSA was getting everything.

AMY GOODMAN: And what was the response when you started to talk about this?

MARK KLEIN: Well, while I was still working at AT&T, I didn’t say anything, because I wanted to keep my job, and it was a scary atmosphere back then, you may remember. But I sat on it, then took some mental notes, and after I retired in 2004 and the end of 2005, when the New York Times came out with their expose that there was warrantless wiretapping going on, then I came forward in early 2006, and I tried to present my documents to some media groups and to some civil liberties groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And I became a witness in EFF’s lawsuit against AT&T.

AMY GOODMAN: Mark—

MARK KLEIN: And eventually—

AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead.

MARK KLEIN: Yeah. And eventually, the media came onto the story. The New York Times came out with the story in April 2006.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the Democratic leadership and Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, of course, of the Democratic Party, calling the bill that’s going to be voted on a compromise?

MARK KLEIN: Well, the Democratic Party and the Congress, in general, has been unfriendly to me for the last two years of my efforts. As I say, I’ve been trying to bring my information forward for about two years now. Even after the Congress went Democratic, they turned their back on me, except for a couple of individuals, like Senator Dodd was friendly and a couple of congressmen. No committee of Congress would invite me to testify; it’s never happened. My attorney sent letters, which were never answered. And they never—and they voted not to investigate. So it’s been clear for some time that Congress wants to help the President cover this up, and they were just looking for a way to do it.

And so, now they have a bill that claims to get some kind of concessions. In fact, they got no concessions. This bill would give immunity to the phone companies and thus would kill any hope of finding out what happened by the lawsuits against AT&T and the other companies. And so, Congress is intervening against the judicial process to kill the lawsuits and essentially protect the President.

And it’s kind of ironic, because, you may know, the FISA law itself originated when the Democratic Party in Congress discovered that Nixon was trying to spy on Democratic National Committee headquarters in the ’70s, and they passed this law to require that any domestic spying must go—must be approved by a secret court, a FISA court. And now, the Democratic Party is helping to basically destroy this law. If this bill passes, the law will become a toothless dead letter, as far as I can tell.

The message that will go out is that, on paper, the President is not supposed to do this, but everybody knows the President violated the law over and over, and now he’s going to get away with it. That’s the message if they pass this law: you can get away with it; we’re not going to enforce this law.