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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

#131

Post by foobarian »

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…

I mean, why not both? If I was a shadowy agency I would start an actual legit sewer inspection company that does real sewer inspections. And then just collect and share a little extra data as needed. Nobody would be the wiser!

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

#133

Post by genewitch »

philipkglass wrote: post #100
genewitch wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not only was there not "definitive evidence"; if you said that the companies did that sort of thing you were called a conspiracy theorist whackaloon. oddly 85% of the general public suddenly was like "well of course they spy on email" after all this came out.

I'm sure it depended on the audience, but I and others [0] guessed at broad electronic surveillance well before the 641A revelations. I was never called a conspiracy theorist for it either. In the 1990s if you had read Bamford's The Puzzle Palace [1] (published in 1982) and observed the government's legal fight against Zimmermann's PGP encryption software [2], you could make an educated guess close to the truth. If y…

> [1] (published in 1982) and observed the government's legal fight against Zimmermann's PGP encryption software [2], you could make an educated guess close to the truth.

what percentage of the US population do you reckon could "make an educated guess" about the technological capabilities of the US government in 2002?

please remember this is a technology discussion forum, not a general public forum.

> Zimmermann's PGP encryption software

"PG what? Encryption? like the cryptkeeper? I like hans zimmer music"

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

#134

Post by brk »

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 is a van built by Ares (I might have the spelling slightly wrong).

Funny enough I once bought a used one, stripped the sewer inspection equipment out, kept the Oman diesel generator and made it into an actual surveillance van.

The inspection robots that came with it were cool. I sold them and the other equipment I pulled out for a good chunk of cash.

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

#135

Post by themcaffee »

frugalmail wrote: post #112
themcaffee wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Generally these are done in coordination with a sewer cleaning truck at the next manhole in the pipe. Very common for them to stay on the phone with each other

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

#136

Post by lurk2 »

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…

> the bad guys can't simultaneously be omniscient and so dumb they're trivially outed like this

This is a false dichotomy. Federal agencies prove themselves to be fallible (even incompetent) all the time, they just have far more resources available to make up for their mistakes.

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

#137

Post by firen777 »

lukan wrote: post #111
jll29 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Judging from the way things are going, what's the difference?

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

#139

Post by tptacek »

lurk2 wrote: post #136
tptacek wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the bad guys can't simultaneously be omniscient and so dumb they're trivially outed like this This is a false dichotomy. Federal agencies prove themselves to be fallible (even incompetent) all the time, they just have far more resources available to make up for their mistakes.

I mean, the real argument here is between "something interesting" and "something boring", and it's message board so "boring" is heavily disfavored. But, yeah, it's a sewer inspection van.

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

#140

Post by Lerc »

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.

That's an odd take. There are numerous examples of people prosaicly defeating the purpose of something that has taken considerable resources to establish.

It's like the spies working in embassies that were easily detectable despite an elaborate cover because they used the car that the previous spy left behind when they went home.

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