Whistleblower Says Feds Spying on All E-Mail

“We need to start restoring the Constitution as soon as possible.”

by Ian Mosley

It’s pretty much an open secret that ever since 9/11, the United States government is spying on people’s e-mail and recording pretty much all domestic e-mail traffic, but every now and then something occurs that confirms what’s going on.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=3833172&page=1 reports that a whistleblower named Mark Klein has spoken out about the domestic spying practices of one major internet service provider, AT&T. A recent news article reports “As an AT&T technician overseeing internet operations in San Francisco, he helped maintain optical splitters that diverted data en route to and from AT&T customers. One day he found that the splitters were hard-wired into a secret room on the sixth floor. Klein said only a management-level employee with NSA security clearance was allowed inside, but documents he obtained from AT&T showed that highly sophisticated data mining equipment was kept there…Conversations he had with other technicians and the AT&T documents led Klein to believe there are 15 to 20 such sites nationwide, including in Seattle, Los Angeles, San Jose, San Diego and Atlanta.”We’ve heard about warrantless wiretaps for years, but no one did anything about them. We should have impeached Bush, but everyone was too lazy, cowardly or complicit. The “war on terror” is a sham. Does anyone really believe that there’s an “Osama bin Laden” who killed nearly 3,000 American and the richest nation in the world can’t catch him? Bin Laden is simply a replacement for the Soviet Union. Because this one skinny Muslim is out there, all of us have to endure strip searches and have our shampoo confiscated whenever we take an airline flight. All those annoying pointless indignities we suffer at the airport -by the way- do nothing to fight terror. They are designed to remind you about 911 every time you fly. If our government really wanted to make air travel safe; we would simply ban Middle Eastern men from any flights in the US.

The ABC article notes “It would be difficult to say whose e-mail, text messages or Internet phone calls the government is monitoring at any given time, but according to [Klein the government has warrantless access to a great deal of internet traffic should they care to take a peek. As information is traded between users it flows also into a locked, secret room on the sixth floor of AT&T’s San Francisco offices and other rooms around the country — where the U.S. government can sift through and find the information it wants, former AT&T employee Mark Klein alleged Wednesday at a press conference on Capitol Hill.”

While Bush is claiming this warrantless wire-tapping is focused on the “war on terror,” it’s only a matter of time until the IRS starts getting information gleaned from all these super-powerful eavesdropping machines. Any idle remark about unreported income, will soon be used to hammer Americans, who foolishly thought they would never become the targets of this prolific wire-tapping.

ABC News goes on: “An exact copy of all Internet traffic that flowed through critical AT&T cables — e-mails, documents, pictures, Web browsing, voice-over-Internet phone conversations, everything — was being diverted to equipment inside the secret room…Klein, who worked for more than 20 years as a technician at AT&T, said that the highly secretive electronics-focused National Security Agency began working with telecom companies to gain wholesale access to vast amounts of data traveling over the Internet. Klein was on Capitol Hill Wednesday attempting to convince lawmakers not to give a blanket, retroactive immunity to telecom companies for their secret cooperation with the government.” In other words, to legitimize the despicable illegal collaboration of certain corporations with the Bush regime in spying on us.

ABC News reports that the dot.com capitalists have responded by trying to use the law to shut Klein up: “AT&T and government lawyers have argued the documents Klein took are proprietary and have tried, as part of a class action filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in January 2006, to reclaim them. In doing so AT&T also verified their authenticity, EFF attorneys argued today. AT&T spokesperson Susan Bean responded to inquiries about the lawsuit and the allegations by Klein in an e-mail statement today: ‘AT&T is fully committed to protecting our customers’ privacy. We do not comment on matters of national security.’ ” In other words, she admits that Klein is telling the truth, or as close to an admission as it’s possible for a giant corporation to make.

This government spying is by no means a secret. The government has admitted for years that they are monitoring people’s e-mails and web sites pretty much all the time. We have simply stopped paying attention to the news and have become completely careless about what we send via e-mail, as if nothing is happening.

Very few Americans are seriously concerned about political dissidents being sent to those secret Third World prisons for nothing more than thought crimes. Remember, all it takes for you to be a terrorist is for the president to say it’s so. No Habeas Corpus means you may never get your day in court. You could be rotting in prison for years because you offended the likes of President Hillary.

We need to start restoring the Constitution as soon as possible. Electing Ron Paul as president would be an excellent step in that direction. Any of the other candidates will keep building on the police state that the Bush-Cheney regime got started.

2007-12-03