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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

#181

Post by schiffern »

rogerallen wrote: post #126
rogerallen wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My top post ever on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/6dwg/wired_unve...

and only 1 link still works. 19 years is a long time to the internet.

Wayback Machine has the rest (for as long as it lasts).

OP https://web.archive.org/web/20060615052051/https://www.wired...

https://web.archive.org/web/20051219151049/http://www.cnn.co...

https://web.archive.org/web/20000302002228/https://www.wired...

https://web.archive.org/web/20060904193022/http://blog.wired...

Remember to donate, folks.

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

#182

Post by emmelaich »

kens wrote: post #125
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

I found a video with an identical National Plant Services sewer inspection van, inspecting a large-diameter sewer line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVXceJ3Yxnw (The photo shows van TV-230 while the video shows van TV-217, so they are different instances of the van.)

I went to the Carylon website to find a list of their companies and got

> Block Reason: Access from your area has been temporarily limited for security reasons.

My area is Australia.

https://caryloncorp.com/find-a-company/

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

#183

Post by mhb »

tptacek wrote: post #39
Bluecobra wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an aside, if you are purchasing an older home make sure you pay for a sewer line inspection. I had no idea this was a thing until a few years later when I had to replace mine and it cost ~$25,000.

We had ours done when we moved in a couple years ago and it was a cool snakey camera thing; they only got us out to the service line; past that would have been a lot more elaborate. Also: that video feed? Pretty gross. As an aside: I think a lot of people here would be surprised at the amount of technology (and surveillance) that goes into setting speed limits and placing stop signs in residential areas.

A lot of people might also be surprised how frequently traffic engineers will OK unnecessary and less safe four way stops in order to get the annoying citizen pestering them to just leave them alone.

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

#184

Post by chelmzy »

waterlu wrote: post #159
foobarian wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

There’s an HVAC company like this also, I’ll bet. Corporate ventilation. A wonderful thing. Everyone needs it. No one suspects it. Or maybe it’s the aquarium guy. No, those are the guys making meth. Gotta love paranoia.

Crypto AG confirmed this sort of thing to be possible.

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

#185

Post by timewizard »

shadowgovt wrote: post #142
taosx wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is crazy.. you guys are focused on vans and mini stories when all his sacrifice and that of thousand if not more americans was snuffed. `Congress intervened by passing the FISA Amendments Act which, in part, granted “retroactive immunity” to the telecommunications carriers for their involvement in the NSA spying programs. This massive grant of immunity for past violations of multiple state and federal laws prote…

You have to remember that half, possibly more than half, of the country is more than okay with what the NSA was doing and is doing. It's not at all surprising that Congress would indemnify people for, more or less, doing what Congress authorized them to do. If we don't like it, we could consider, maybe not voting the same people into that Congress. Over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over. A full 24 Sen…

> You have to remember that half, possibly more than half, of the country is more than okay with what the NSA was doing and is doing.

I doubt this. I'd also be interested to see if those people actually know, on any real level, what the NSA was actually doing.

> If we don't like it, we could consider, maybe not voting the same people into that Congress. Over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over.

They so reliably do the opposite of what people want and yet continue to win. You don't find this at all odd and you put it down to lack of consideration on the part of the electorate.

> That's not what you'd expect of a citizenship that was actually upset about being spied upon by their government.

The joys of being old enough to remember the Church Committee, The House Select Committee on Assassinations, The JFK Records Review Board. PEOPLE ARE CLEARLY NOT OKAY WITH THIS. Yet those who carry water for the deep state are unimpeded by this. Please see this, or at least, don't repeat simple falsehoods about the electorate.

It's like coming across a drowning man and laughing in his face about his predicament.

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

#186

Post by juliusdavies »

tptacek wrote: post #174
dandelany wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps they are optimizing for having plausible deniability/a fully fleshed out backstory in case they are questioned by eg. local cops or a security guard, moreso than inconspicuousness to a random passerby who is unlikely to pose any danger with their idle theorizing

Or, you know, they're inspecting the sewers.

I think NSA has hacked the van (without the van operators realizing) and so it’s both a sewer inspection van and an NSA surveillance van at the same time.

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

#188

Post by lurk2 »

tptacek wrote: post #139
lurk2 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

My comment did not express any opinion as to whether this was or was not a surveillance van, and this has no bearing on the proposed alternatives being a false dichotomy.

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

#189

Post by rkagerer »

kens wrote: post #125
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

I found a video with an identical National Plant Services sewer inspection van, inspecting a large-diameter sewer line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVXceJ3Yxnw (The photo shows van TV-230 while the video shows van TV-217, so they are different instances of the van.)

Please obtain one of each, and do a teardown to confirm ;-)

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

#190

Post by rl3 »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #151
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.

The really odd thing is that 85% of the general public will say "well of course they spy on email" even today, after Snowden's leaks showed that the Obama administration had shut that down.

Setting aside the fact that the leaks you're referring to are over a decade old at this point, they also established that GCHQ buffered the entirety of the UK's internet traffic for 72 hours, bit for bit.

If you think there's no collection on e-mail, rather than just legal shell games being played with terminology and various compartments, then I've got a bridge to sell you.

In fact, the bridge is made of metadata and nothing else.

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