[HN Gopher] Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass...
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Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has
died
Author : leotravis10
Score : 312 points
Date : 2025-03-12 21:05 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eff.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eff.org)
| aio2 wrote:
| Damn.
|
| I don't know if this started the whole movement or whatever you'd
| call it for this push towards privacy and the general public
| knowing about it, but it helped a lot. Before him releasing info
| about room 641A and whatever else, there really wasn't definitive
| evidence of any government spying and tampering, and either with
| the intention of starting this movement or simply letting people
| know, he was a big push in the right direction.
|
| tldr: he's a w
| DannyBee wrote:
| RIP - truly someone who tried to make the world better.
| madrox wrote:
| Had the privilege of watching him receive an award from EFF years
| ago at ETech. Gave a brief speech. Struck me as a gentle man who
| really did what he thought was right and for no other purpose. It
| took moral strength to do what he did. I hope he rests easy.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/02/t-whistleblower-wins-a...
| kstrauser wrote:
| Nooooooo! He was my next door neighbor a few years ago, and I
| knew him as a person before I realized that I knew him as a hero.
|
| His dogs were fiercely protective of his house, which is
| perfectly understandable. One day I saw a "sewer cleaning" van
| behind his house, and I have a hard time believing that's what it
| really was: https://honeypot.net/2025/03/12/rip-mark-klein.html
| itisit wrote:
| The money shot! I did not realize sewer cleaning required so
| much onsite IT. Are those rack units running computational
| fluid dynamics models to figure out how to unclog elaborate
| networks of pipes?
| spaceribs wrote:
| I'd like to believe it was an inspection van:
| https://nationalplant.com/services/digital-tv-inspection/
|
| I'd like to believe that, but I don't.
| kstrauser wrote:
| That very well could be what it was. If it had been
| anything other than:
|
| 1. Spotless.
|
| 2. Parked right behind Klein's (and by extension, my)
| house.
|
| 3. Skittish, such that they closed the door right after I
| took the picture and drove off less than a minute later
| without pulling any gear up out of a manhole or something.
|
| then that's probably what I'd chalk it up to. I am
| absolutely not 100% convinced it was, say, an undercover
| NSA van.
|
| And yet, that's exactly what I thought it was from the
| moment I saw the gear racks and monitors inside.
| Boogie_Man wrote:
| Somebody give the number on the van a call and post
| results
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I am willing to believe it was innocuous. The guy already
| spilled the beans and has been blackballed from government
| access. Does he require clandestine surveillance any more?
| Easy enough to get "national security" reasons why all of
| his devices need to be tapped. More intimidating to have
| visible GMen watching him for life.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Interestingly, it seems the 'real' sewer cleaning company
| uses a bunch of tech to do their inspections, etc.:
|
| https://specializedmaintenance.com/services/digital-tv-
| inspe...
|
| (Which would make it an excellent van for the 3-letter spooks
| to copy, so not really persuasive either way)
| cookiengineer wrote:
| I wanted to point out that when visiting those sites from
| Germany (nationalplant.com and the
| specializedmaintenance.com website) it shows the same
| unavailable geoblocked message. I wouldn't have recognized
| it but after opening both links in new tabs on my phone I
| thought I forgot to open one of the links in this thread
| and I double-checked it.
|
| Are those fake companies both hosted on wordfence or
| something? What are the odds, huh?
| nabakin wrote:
| I don't think I've ever seen the inside of an actual undercover
| van before. Crazy picture. Do we know anything else about them?
| lukan wrote:
| I would not jump to conclusions so soon.
|
| A) I would question why they would do the effort of still
| doing surveillance on him
|
| B) if they do, they are usually so smart to keep the door
| closed
|
| C) like others have mentioned, sewer cleaning comes with a
| lot of tech (I assume remote controlled machines)
| tptacek wrote:
| That's almost definitely just a sewer inspection van; I found
| videos that company has of "multi-sensor pipeline inspections"
| with the same van, open, with the same equipment visible, and a
| bunch of people following a bunch of equipment down into a
| manhole.
| kstrauser wrote:
| It probably was! But given the batch of circumstances, I
| think it's at least plausible that it was more than that.
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't think it's very plausible. The subtext of the photo
| is "that looks comically unlike what you'd inspect from a
| sewer inspection van". Well, I can tell you pretty much for
| sure: thats' what the inside of a sewer inspection van from
| that company looks like.
|
| It took just a couple minutes (less than 5) to go look this
| up and find the video, for what it's worth.
|
| Maybe it's an NSA wet team! Wet, because they do sewer
| inspection work. :)
| bawolff wrote:
| If we are going down the conspiracy rabbit hole, i assume
| spies can purchase real sewer vans with the logo of real
| sewer companies on it.
|
| I agree though that it seems more plausible to just be a
| real sewer van.
| tptacek wrote:
| I think if they're buying a fake sewer inspection van
| they're probably smart enough to find one that doesn't
| look to people on the Internet like it's a prop out of
| the movie Enemy of the State.
| Bluecobra wrote:
| As an aside, if you are purchasing an older home make sure
| you pay for a sewer line inspection. I had no idea this was a
| thing until a few years later when I had to replace mine and
| it cost ~$25,000.
| tptacek wrote:
| We had ours done when we moved in a couple years ago and it
| was a cool snakey camera thing; they only got us out to the
| service line; past that would have been a lot more
| elaborate. Also: that video feed? Pretty gross.
|
| As an aside: I think a lot of people here would be
| surprised at the amount of technology (and surveillance)
| that goes into setting speed limits and placing stop signs
| in residential areas.
| edaemon wrote:
| I also have an older home and we had to repair our sewer
| line. It was clay pipe which had broken in a few spots and
| had major root intrusion. Thankfully there's some newer
| technology that makes it significantly cheaper in the right
| circumstances -- instead of digging up your street
| connection and laying in new pipe they can blow an epoxy-
| soaked liner into your existing pipe, then run a curing
| light through it. It ended up being less than 40% of the
| cost of replacement and works just as well.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Klein
|
| https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/interview...
|
| https://www.eff.org/document/public-unredacted-klein-declara...
|
| https://medium.com/@illicitpopsicle/mark-klein-the-nsa-whist... |
| https://archive.today/LlZSs
|
| https://medium.com/@chelsealynnqueen94/mark-klein-whistleblo... |
| https://archive.today/7RlfJ
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44edsh6_LUc
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqeMkv5FHfU
|
| (Senator Chris Dodd interviewed Mark, but the video is currently
| private unfortunately: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9aeKF-
| rOGA)
| roenxi wrote:
| The tolerance for the US mass spying efforts remains weird. It
| undermines the credibility of many US politicians around Trump -
| yes the US public appears to be set to vote in Hitler-equivalents
| for the forseeable future. No, dismantling the insane spying
| apparatus is not a major agenda point.
|
| Marry those two ideas together.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| It's pretty much a forgone conclusion since they are putting AI
| into every intersection. How are you going to argue against the
| fact that government AI needs your data for training?
| psadauskas wrote:
| Its fine, as long as they're spying on the radical woke
| leftists. They'd never spy on one of the good guys like me! /s
| dang wrote:
| Related. There were probably other relevant threads over the
| years--can anyone find some?
|
| _Room 641A_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41507188 -
| Sept 2024 (5 comments)
|
| _The secrets of Room 641A (2008)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38305501 - Nov 2023 (4
| comments)
|
| _Room 641A_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32984515 -
| Sept 2022 (2 comments)
|
| _Room 641A_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23350120 -
| May 2020 (70 comments)
|
| _Room 641A_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12515724 -
| Sept 2016 (75 comments)
|
| _Room 641A_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5847166 -
| June 2013 (44 comments)
| efeamzaov wrote:
| Yetel bg . com https://news.ycombinator.com/item?d=642801299
| codetrotter wrote:
| I find it hilarious that this spam bot literally chose a
| comment by dang to respond with spam to.
|
| Doubly so when the account has one comment 14 days ago where
| someone else tried to mention dang to have him see the spam
| :D
| rosegroove wrote:
| SHould've been us all.
| neil_s_anderson wrote:
| I find it odd how many people automatically assume that whatever
| the NSA is up to must be undesirable and therefore should be
| opposed.
|
| I mean, where do you think analysis of plans by terrorists and
| nation state adversaries to attack our nation and its allies
| comes from? The raw intelligence data these are based on can only
| be gathered by surveillance of communications, both targeted and
| in bulk.
|
| You should all be supporting this, as you benefit from it every
| day.
| rozap wrote:
| Yea, it's a good thing that since we live in a democracy we'd
| never elect anyone with bad intentions.
|
| What a silly take.
| skoopie wrote:
| We benefit from drug dealers too. They bring extra money into
| the community and they give rappers something to rap about.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| The point is that mass domestic surveillance of American
| nationals violates common understanding of the law. It makes no
| sense for the requirements to get a wiretap to be so stringent
| but the requirements to monitor someone's internet traffic to
| be nonexistent, just because it's laundered through
| "intelligence gathering" and you argue it's therefore not "law
| enforcement."
| neil_s_anderson wrote:
| The point of bulk data collection is to be able to, in
| effect, take a wiretap in the past before you knew what you'd
| need to be wiretapping in the present, by querying the bulk
| datasets for communications between specific endpoints within
| specific points in time.
|
| As time travel doesn't exist, this is the next best
| technology available.
| ziddoap wrote:
| I think we all know that. We, or I at least, don't agree
| with it.
| neil_s_anderson wrote:
| You don't agree with monitoring the communications of
| adversaries at all, or you don't agree with doing the
| equivalent for communications made in the recent past?
| ziddoap wrote:
| I don't agree with mass collection of data of non-
| guilty/non-suspected citizens for "just in case"
| situations in the future.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Think of how safe we'd all be if we were on camera 24/7/365!
|
| Let me put it this way: I don't do anything illegal in my
| bathroom, but damned if I want someone watching me in there.
| Everyone has their line they don't want crossed. Klein's - and
| the EFF's, and mine - is somewhere past the NSA monitoring
| every single communication in the entire country without a
| warrant. I have no objection with them monitoring specific
| suspects with a court order, but I don't want them listening to
| people who aren't being actively, personally investigated.
| neil_s_anderson wrote:
| Just because your communications data or metadata exists in
| some bulk dataset somewhere doesn't mean that it's being
| actively and personally investigated by anyone.
|
| As with the issuance of a warrant for wiretapping, there
| would need to be a proportionate and legitmate reason for
| your communications within a such a dataset to be looked at.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I do not want my data included in the dataset. "We're not
| looking at it, pinky swear!" rings hollow.
| neil_s_anderson wrote:
| Why would an analyst at the NSA be looking at your
| communications data?
|
| It's a bit like the police getting a search warrant to
| look around your home. If there's no legitimate reason to
| do it, like having reasonable suspicion of a crime that
| requires investigation, then they're not going to.
| ziddoap wrote:
| This is just a rewording of the "nothing to hide"
| argument.
| dannyobrien wrote:
| Well, the question at hand was, and is: _what_ should we be
| supporting? I don 't, in fact, assume that what the NSA is
| doing is bad, but in order for the public and the oversight
| systems the legislature put in place, _someone_ has to know
| what 's going on. The program Mark Klein revealed surprised
| legislators, including John Sensenbrenner, the author of the
| legislation that was used as a justification for the program:
| https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/patriot-act-author-introd...
|
| Many people worried that the PATRIOT Act was overreach for
| surveillance, but the bill did pass. What happened with Mark's
| whistleblowing is that policymakers and the public found out
| that there were other programs, potentially illegal under even
| the PATRIOT Act (and, indeed the US Constitution), that had
| been hidden or obfuscated to their oversight bodies.
|
| (Incidentally, the government's strategy in the cases against
| the NSA program was to say that even asking about legal
| authorisation and grounding of the program was in itself, a
| violation of national security. Many years after Mark's act, Ed
| Snowden's first published leak was this authorisation document,
| confirming that Mark was right, and that, had those cases been
| able to proceed, there would have been grounds for
| investigation.)
| AtomBalm wrote:
| He revealed unlawful surveillance years prior to and of the same
| gravity as Snowden, but only one became a celebrity. I would love
| to know the reason for that.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I say this without intending to denigrate Snowden at all:
| Klein's situation was less messy. Snowden had a top secret
| clearance and vowed to safeguard all the secrets he came
| across. Klein was just a regular guy doing regular work for a
| regular company when he saw something strange. That doesn't
| mean I think Snowden was wrong, just that there's a ton of room
| for people to say "I agree with him but he shouldn't have done
| that because he swore not to". Klein didn't have those
| obligations.
| marxisttemp wrote:
| Likewise, Manning got pardoned when her release was clearly
| messier and less targeted than Snowden's. There isn't much
| logic to these things.
|
| To be clear, all 3 are personal heroes of mine.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| If Snowden was such a hero, why did he take Russian
| citizenship and not oppose the invasion of Ukraine?
|
| Makes you wonder what his real motivations were. Nobility,
| or serving his true masters by damaging American influence.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| [delayed]
| anonym29 wrote:
| This is disinformation deliberately perpetrated by the
| same Obama administration that intentionally trapped
| Snowden in Russia by waiting to cancel his passport until
| the precise moment after he landed in Russia, but before
| he boarded his connecting flight to Ecuador - a course of
| action that was undertaken to intentionally forge the
| false narrative you're now repeating.
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| Can you really not think of any (charitable) reasons?
| anonym29 wrote:
| Snowden also swore an oath to uphold the constitution,
| including the fourth amendment that the NSA was illegally
| violating (one NSA crime) and covering up (second NSA crime),
| including by lying to congress (third NSA crime), as well as
| to protect America from domestic enemies, like the kind of
| traitors who'd come up with a secret plan to violate the
| constitutional rights of the entire country and lie about it
| to congress.
|
| Thank goodness he took his oath more seriously than the "I
| was just following orders" crowd. We know from WW2 that "I
| was just following orders" is not a legitimate excuse to help
| facilitate grave atrocities, like all of those other NSA
| employees did every single day, in violation of their own
| oaths that they each swore.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| Probably because one absconded half-successfully and became
| sort of stateless. That's a way more exciting story!
| jmpman wrote:
| I expect there were 10,000 who knew, and he's the only one who
| spoke up. Now, the other 9,999 likely believed it was to thwart
| terrorism, as this was post 9/11. Maybe those who had visibility
| into who was being surveyed were checking to ensure the spying
| didn't cross their ethical boundaries. Interesting to think of
| what each individual in the system was considering.
| jypepin wrote:
| Is his book "Wiring Up The Big Brother Machine...And Fighting It"
| worth a read?
| xyst wrote:
| NSA and AT&T (telecom in general?) caught with their pants down
| not just once, but twice.
|
| All of this heavily publicized yet here we are today with privacy
| being an afterthought in everyone's mind.
|
| I hate to say it but the private corporations and state have
| really made most of the population complacent with wide net
| surveillance -- cameras everywhere, privacy non-existent, "kyc",
| "selfies", social media, big tech creating profiles of users, and
| data brokerages selling and buying "anonymized" profiles.
| taosx wrote:
| This is crazy.. you guys are focused on vans and mini stories
| when all his sacrifice and that of thousand if not more americans
| was snuffed.
|
| `Congress intervened by passing the FISA Amendments Act which, in
| part, granted "retroactive immunity" to the telecommunications
| carriers for their involvement in the NSA spying programs. This
| massive grant of immunity for past violations of multiple state
| and federal laws protecting communications privacy was
| unprecedented.`
| djmips wrote:
| Age 79/80 ?
| trescenzi wrote:
| I'm watching Person of Interest for the first time. It's
| interesting watching it today now that the premise, minus 100%
| accurate crime prediction, is largely a forgone conclusion. It
| was produced after Klein but before Snowden and does a good job
| exploring the expansion of surveillance and just how motivated
| the government is to have a system that tracks everyone. Of
| course it's fiction but it's a fun watch that asks a lot of good
| questions.
| rsingel wrote:
| R.I.P.
|
| He was a true and brave whistleblower.
|
| I had the luck of getting a hold of his docs when they were under
| court seal, and we published them at Wired.
|
| Only met and interviewed him later. He was a gentle man with a
| moral compass. A rarity even among whistleblowers.
|
| The world is poorer without him.
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