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Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

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Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#111

Post by lukan »

jll29 wrote: post #98
kstrauser wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be the change you want to see. I mentioned the vans and his dogs because Mark wasn't some random picture on the Internet, but the nice guy a couple houses down who talked about the volunteer work he did for harbor seals[0]. He was a real person we liked a lot and I thought others might enjoy hearing about his noisy, overprotective golden retrievers. But yes, he was also a personal hero to me before I met him in real…

Where are today's technicians that are prostituting themselves for the communications companies around the world that this can still be happening? Man up and remove those splitters, cables, show us the drawings, reports and PPT slides! R.I.P. Mark

I guess not too many want to have to hide in russia.

Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#112

Post by frugalmail »

themcaffee wrote: post #79
kstrauser wrote: post #5

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

That certainly is just a Sewer TV inspection van! I have a hand in writing some of the software that is run on these and processes the videos that come out of them. They all have rack mounted PCs and a monitor with a joystick to control the crawler that goes in the pipe.

I'm really curious then.

Why's the visible person holding the headphones tighter against his ear? What kind of sounds need to be processed by a human for sewer inspection?

To their benefit, if it was sus, they would have kept the door shut.

Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#113

Post by akomtu »

neil_s_anderson wrote: post #51
ziddoap wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we all know that. We, or I at least, don't agree with it.

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?

And the adversaries is the entire nation at this point.

Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#114

Post by t-3 »

neil_s_anderson wrote: post #54
kstrauser wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not want my data included in the dataset. "We're not looking at it, pinky swear!" rings hollow.

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.

Maybe they want to look at the naked pics being sent between you and your sexual partners, as has happened many times. Maybe they want to spy on their own sexual partners or prospective partners, which has also happened many times. Maybe they want to blackmail people for their own gain, which has, once again, happened many times. There are innumerable reasons with plenty of precedent for each and every one.

Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#115

Post by jll29 »

anonym29 wrote: post #77
kstrauser wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won't get any argument from me. I agree. And even in agreement, I still say that there's a much larger grey area in Snowden's case. We can and should discuss whether his actions were justified. I think they are. But I can at least appreciate that people who disagree have legitimate reasons to see it otherwise. Klein's case didn't come with all that other baggage.

No argument from me with what you wrote, either, I just wanted to make sure I was doing my interpretation justice by sharing it - there's certainly no shortage of posters parroting the other side's talking points. It's interesting that Klein's tell-all didn't get as much attention despite being less legally fraught. It makes me wonder how much of the Snowden media frenzy was organic in the first place, and if not muc…

Could be that Snowden took it to The Guardian, a foreign and international news outlet. The story how British intelligence folks showed up at the Guardian HQ and symbolically destroyed a hard drive, and the way Guardian management used their New York offices to work around restrictions in UK law to publish the story, that's quite a story itself, and of course journalists know how to get coverage and reach.

Mark targeted the EFF, not a news outlet, in contrast. The EFF probably first and foremost had the legal pursuit in mind, not making a story big.

The most shocking things of all for me was how ignorant ordinary people were and still are about both whistle blowers' disclosures and the subsequent pretend fixes by lawmakers. (Cynically, I'm inclined to add there might be more riots and demonstrations if you take Heinz ketchup away from people than theirlegitimate rights to privacy.)

Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#116

Post by hox »

tptacek wrote: post #90
ryanisnan wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if a sufficiently capable entity is interested in snooping on an individual like this, mimicking a sewer tv inspection van is a trivial endeavour. You don’t know at all what that van was doing.

Yes we do. It was a sewer inspection van. If it was the NSA, their van wouldn't look so goofy that people took one look at the photo and assumed it had to be an NSA van, which is what happened here. This is a bad movie plot trope: the bad guys can't simultaneously be omniscient and so dumb they're trivially outed like this, just like the real supervillain isn't going to monologue while you free yourself from the chai…

That, and it would be an FBI van, not an NSA van. But the point holds.

Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#117

Post by deciplex »

psunavy03 wrote: post #53
marxisttemp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

Probably because the US empire had deteriorated enough by that point that revoking passports for exposing the blatant lies and crimes of our government was on the table by then.

Of course, it's different these days. These days they'd just kill Snowden. And Mark Klein, for that matter.

Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#118

Post by orthecreedence »

neil_s_anderson wrote: post #54
kstrauser wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not want my data included in the dataset. "We're not looking at it, pinky swear!" rings hollow.

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.

> 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.

Yes, it is a bit like this. Except in this case the police don't need a warrant, they can enter your home for any reason at their discretion. You're putting a lot of trust in a bunch of people you've (I'm assuming) never met working for an agency that has demonstrated a complete lack of regard for the constitution. Either that or you're a really terrible glowie: "How do you do, fellow tech enthusiasts??"

Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#119

Post by trescenzi »

choult wrote: post #103
trescenzi wrote: post #57

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…

Oh dear... You should hear some of the stories about Jim Caviezel[0]... On second thought, maybe make up your own mind before you dip into that. [0] https://open.spotify.com/episode/1euFlDCuryFSzMw6BjQCWA

Oh yea I always read about actors during commercial break. Was a bit startled when reading his Wikipedia.

Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#120

Post by t-3 »

tptacek wrote: post #96
ziddoap wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was a sewer inspection van. Having said that, reading comments like this, I sometimes think it would actually be great cover. Because you have respected people, like yourself, unequivocally stating that it couldn't possibly be an NSA van. But, to say it again, I agree that I don't think the NSA would need to do this. My above line of reasoning certainly doesn't hold too much water under serious scrutiny.

A significant multiplier of my certainty here comes from the fact that I was responding to a thread full of people who seemed certain that no sewer inspection van could look like that, which to me says "this van is not inconspicuous", which defeats the whole purpose of having a cover-story van. You can second-guess that, but I think past this point, we're reenacting the duel between Vizzini and Westley.

From personal experience with police investigations... they aren't really all that inconspicuous when they come aspying. The van with tints several shades darker than the legal limit that sits outside and the trucks with dash-mount computers and racks of equipment visible through the windshield shadowing your every move aren't exactly hard to see if you're paying attention. When they've got telescopic lenses watching from an adjacent building, you can also see those with the naked eye if you look closely. Hopefully national spy agencies are better at it than small town drug task forces, but...
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