As the so-called “maverick Republican”, “freedom loving” Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania argues for a “compromise” (source: The Hill) to a proposed FISA overhaul which would grant retroactive immunity to law-breaking telecom companies who cooperated with the Bush Administration’s ILLEGAL wiretapping and data-mining “PROGRAM”, a former AT&T technician is on Capitol Hill, blowing the whistle on his former employer.

From The Washington Post:

A Story of Surveillance
Former Technician ‘Turning In’ AT&T Over NSA Program

By Ellen Nakashima

His first inkling that something was amiss came in summer 2002 when he opened the door to admit a visitor from the National Security Agency to an office of AT&T in San Francisco.

“What the heck is the NSA doing here?” Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician, said he asked himself.

A year or so later, he stumbled upon documents that, he said, nearly caused him to fall out of his chair. The documents, he said, show that the NSA gained access to massive amounts of e-mail and search and other Internet records of more than a dozen global and regional telecommunications providers. AT&T allowed the agency to hook into its network at a facility in San Francisco and, according to Klein, many of the other telecom companies probably knew nothing about it.

Klein is in Washington this week to share his story in the hope that it will persuade lawmakers not to grant legal immunity to telecommunications firms that helped the government in its anti-terrorism efforts. …”

(Snip!)

… “If they’ve done something massively illegal and unconstitutional — well, they should suffer the consequences,” Klein said. “It’s not my place to feel bad for them. They made their bed, they have to lie in it. The ones who did [anything wrong], you can be sure, are high up in the company. Not the average Joes, who I enjoyed working with.”

In an interview yesterday, he alleged that the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T . Contrary to the government’s depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists, Klein said, much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic. Klein said he believes that the NSA was analyzing the records for usage patterns as well as for content.

He said the NSA built a special room to receive data streamed through an AT&T Internet room containing “peering links,” or major connections to other telecom providers. The largest of the links delivered 2.5 gigabits of data — the equivalent of one-quarter of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s text — per second, said Klein, whose documents and eyewitness account form the basis of one of the first lawsuits filed against the telecom giants after the government’s warrantless-surveillance program was reported in the New York Times in December 2005.

Claudia Jones, an AT&T spokeswoman, said she had no comment on Klein’s allegations. …”

As an “aside”, isn’t it peculiar how all of these so-called “spokesmen” and “spokeswomen” never seem to have anything to say? I wonder if these jobs pay well, because if they do, I might be missing my calling — “official spokesman” for some lawbreaking company. How hard is it to walk up to a microphone and say “no comment” anyway? I do believe God has Blessed me with the natural skills to do this for a living; guess I just need a “hookup”. Readers? Hook me up if you can. Anyhoo…