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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

#191

Post by rkagerer »

itisit wrote: post #9
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

The money shot! I did not realize sewer cleaning required so much onsite IT. Are those rack units running computational fluid dynamics models to figure out how to unclog elaborate networks of pipes?

Conversely, makes me think my IT truck with all its network cables and racks, needs a toilet.

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

#192

Post by georgeplusplus »

taosx wrote: post #46
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

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…

So glad you pointed this out. people are numb to these sort of news now a days.

Reminds me of George Carlins words, “ It’s never gonna get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got.”

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

#193

Post by rkagerer »

Boogie_Man wrote: post #49
kstrauser wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That very well could be what it was. If it had been anything other than: 1. Spotless. 2. Parked right behind Klein's (and by extension, my) house. 3. Skittish, such that they closed the door right after I took the picture and drove off less than a minute later without pulling any gear up out of a manhole or something. then that's probably what I'd chalk it up to. I am absolutely not 100% convinced it was, say, an und…

Somebody give the number on the van a call and post results

I called and asked them if they were NSA. Very nice lady explained "No, trust me, we're definitely just NPS" (j/k).

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/national-plant-services-inc_e...

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

#194

Post by Tepix »

jll29 wrote: post #115
anonym29 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 targe…

> Mark targeted the EFF, not a news outlet, in contrast.

"Mark not only saw how it works, he had the documents to prove it. He brought us over a hundred pages of authenticated AT&T schematic diagrams and tables. Mark also shared this information with major media outlets, numerous Congressional staffers, and at least two senators personally."

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

#195

Post by somenameforme »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #21
spaceribs wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to believe it was an inspection van: https://nationalplant.com/services/digital-tv-inspection/ I'd like to believe that, but I don't.

I am willing to believe it was innocuous. The guy already spilled the beans and has been blackballed from government access. Does he require clandestine surveillance any more? Easy enough to get “national security” reasons why all of his devices need to be tapped. More intimidating to have visible GMen watching him for life.

For some reason this reminded me of Ernest Hemingway. In the later parts of his life, he began to believe he was being followed and tracked by the FBI, and these delusions eventually gave way to various other issues. Or perhaps it could be the other way around, but there is a catch here.

In either case this led to him being somewhat brutally treated with electroconvulsive therapy, repeatedly, to little effect beyond damaging his mind. A quote from on that was, "What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient." He would kill himself not long thereafter.

The interesting thing is that the FBI was following and tracking him, and simply stayed silent as this all played out.

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

#196

Post by jancsika »

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.

> That certainly is just a Sewer TV inspection van!

Hee hee, I can hear the NSA now: "Dammit, who parked a sewer inspection van in the middle of our massive surveillance network?!?"

Back on the topic of indiscriminate wide-net surveillance (which I think was also the focus of the AT&T whistleblower), I quote Bruce Schneier on the Snowden leaks:

"I started this talk by naming three different programs that collect Google user data. Those programs work under different technical capabilities, different corporate alliances, and different legal authorities. You should expect the same thing to be true for cell phone data, for internet data, for everything else. When you have the budget of the NSA and you're given the choice, 'Should you do it this way or that way?' The correct answer is: both."

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iMFPMqboZc

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

#197

Post by jghn »

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.

In Russia people "fall out the window" all the time. It is intentional. We need to adjust.

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

#198

Post by acomjean »

waste_monk wrote: post #175
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.

Do you work for the National Sewerage Agency? :D

Flowers By Irene.

https://frinkiac.com/caption/S03E04/719740

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

#199

Post by saghm »

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.

> You can second-guess that, but I think past this point, we're reenacting the duel between Vizzini and Westley

So I guess the reveal is that it _is_ a real sewer inspection van, but the NSA has legitimately been inspecting sewers for years to innoculate themselves from suspicion?

I guess they must be down there looking for rodents of unusual size.

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

#200

Post by somenameforme »

zmgsabst wrote: post #155
genewitch wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [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 PG…

People suspected there was funny business going on since the Patriot Act was passed in 2001. By 2003 gangs were aware government spied on phones at scale. NSA regularly came up in my high school tech class in 2004, in connection with War on Terror. By 2005, the program was confirmed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(... Lots of people knew that mass surveillance was likely with the advent o…

Lots of people know lots of things. The problem is those things aren't always true. And until there is a defacto public acknowledgement of something many people defer to the 'official position.'

Here's a present time one for you - all US based cloud providers, including Apple, are providing full (and probably indirect) real time access to everything stored on those servers to various organizations including, but not limited to, the NSA. Lawsuits around this issue are motivated solely by an effort to do away with parallel construction [1] and enable the evidence obtained through such means to be able to be directly used.

Lots of people know this, lots of people also think this is crazy talk. And prior to Snowden, and to a lesser degree Klein, the overwhelming majority fell into the latter camp regarding anything even remotely close to the scope and scale of what the NSA was doing.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

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