"In October 2003, the AT&T technician Mark Klein was transferred to a small office on San Francisco's Folsom Street. He was tasked with maintaining the seventh-floor "internet room," where fiber-optic cables carried billions of bits of data across the company's network every second.
Klein and his office mates were all aware of the mysterious room recently constructed directly below them on the sixth floor by people from the National Security Agency -- Room 641A. But they weren't given an inkling of its purpose. Only one or two AT&T employees with NSA clearance could enter. Everyone else called it "the secret room."
Over time, Klein saw company documents and schematics that appeared to reveal that a piece of equipment installed in his internet room, known as a splitter, was making a copy of all the traffic passing through those cables and funneling it downstairs to the secret room. The entire data stream was being duplicated and diverted, Klein wrote in a 2009 memoir: "email browsing, voice-over-internet phone calls, pictures, streaming video, you name it . . . the communications of millions of people, foreign and domestic, randomly mixed together."
Klein also gathered evidence indicating that traffic from more than a dozen other internet providers, whose networks were in communication with AT&T's, was also potentially being copied; that AT&T appeared to have set up similar secret rooms in many other U.S. cities; and that his office's secret room housed a processor capable of analyzing the traffic coming from the splitter -- peering inside that intercepted data, not just blindly copying it in bulk.
Klein, who died March 8 in Oakland, Calif., from pancreatic cancer at age 79, told "Frontline": "It dawned on me all at once, and I fell out of my chair." Knowing the NSA wasn't lawfully permitted to conduct surveillance domestically, only abroad, Klein concluded he was unwittingly sitting in the middle of, as he put it, "a massive, unconstitutional, illegal operation."
Eventually, he shared what he knew, leading to lawsuits against the NSA but little practical effect. The breadth of the agency's mass surveillance programs post-9/11 would be revealed more explosively several years later by NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Interviewed afterward by the public affairs show "Democracy Now," Klein said, "Of course I feel very vindicated."
Initially, Klein said nothing. "I was too scared," he told "Democracy Now," "and I didn't know if I could find anyone to believe me." Moreover, he couldn't afford to lose his job. Even after retiring at age 59 in 2004, Klein remained wary of possible government retaliation. He'd taken the documents home with him but debated throwing them out.
In December 2005, the New York Times reported that after 9/11, President George W. Bush had secretly authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants to combat terrorism. The paper wrote that the agency had "monitored the international telephone calls and international email messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people" within the U.S.
Klein figured that he was sitting on many of the details and that the scale and scope were far greater than reported. He resolved to go public. Soon he knocked on the door of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights nonprofit in San Francisco, and asked, "Do you folks care about privacy?"
Using Klein's information, the EFF filed a class-action lawsuit, Hepting v. AT&T, setting off a long, overlapping set of legal battles with Klein at their center. The materials he gave EFF were put under seal, but they were company documents, not classified government documents. Unlike Snowden, Klein never had a government security clearance so he couldn't be prosecuted for violating one.
The government asked for the case to be dismissed on the grounds that Klein's leak could expose state secrets. A federal judge ruled against that argument. But in 2008, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act, changing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to legalize surveillance programs like the one Klein was exposing and retroactively immunize companies like AT&T for their cooperation. The law, which Klein lobbied against, killed EFF's lawsuit.
In television interviews at the time, Klein came across as a mild-mannered retired engineer, with wire-rim glasses, a tidy white mustache and a slightly clipped way of pronouncing "internet" that revealed a vestige of a Brooklyn accent.
"I didn't think of him as particularly radical," said Cindy Cohn, then an EFF attorney on the case and now EFF's executive director. "He was somebody who had paid really close attention in civics class and was really committed to the values of this country." But after the legal failure, she said, "He was really, really bitter and angry that nobody listened to him."
A subsequent suit against the NSA was thrown out in 2019; a federal judge ruled then that Klein "can only speculate about what data were actually processed and by whom in the secure room and how and for what purpose, as he was never involved in its operation." The judge accepted the government's argument that continuing with the suit posed "a grave risk to the national security." In 2022, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal.
Klein was born on May 2, 1945, in Brooklyn. He was married to Linda Thurston for 40 years before Thurston's sudden death in 2023. "Mark never got over her death," said Martha Robertson, a longtime friend.
In 1962, Klein entered Cornell University to study engineering. But as the U.S. sent troops to Vietnam, he became deeply interested in America's role as an imperial power and switched to history. "He got pretty politicized," said his older brother, Larry Klein, but "he didn't wear his politics on his sleeve. He was very reserved, a serious student."
Klein marched against the war and traveled to the South to register Black voters and support a group founded by Black World War II veterans that promoted armed self-defense against the KKK.
He found his first corporate job, in-house computer repair technician for Singer Corp., demeaning. "He had to carry a beeper with him so that, even on Saturday and Sundays when he wasn't at work, he'd have to leave to fix the goddamn computer," Larry Klein remembered. Robertson recalled that after joining AT&T in 1981, Klein grew discouraged by a "decimation of the workforce and the decimation of the unions."
In his memoir, "Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine . . . and Fighting It," Klein wrote that he and a couple of colleagues had only narrowly avoided being laid off before landing at Folsom Street. The company, he wrote, "preferred to throw us out with the old equipment." He seemed to adopt a similarly negative view of government, amplified by his NSA discovery.
Surveillance is "a sign of a government that's detached," he told Media Roots Radio in 2015. "It's not a people's government. It's a government of the ruling class: a small minority of rich and super rich. And as long as that's the case, they'll continue to spy on everybody." Asked if he had any faith that the American government would ever hold itself to its constitutional ideals, he replied: "None, zero, nada."" [1]
1. REVIEW --- Obituaries: A Whistleblower Who Revealed Domestic Spying --- The AT&T technician went public about U.S. surveillance several years before Edward Snowden, but to his frustration, his own disclosures never gained traction. Mooallem, Jon. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 12 Apr 2025: C6.
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