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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

#91

Post by ryanisnan »

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…

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.

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

#92

Post by tptacek »

ryanisnan wrote: post #91
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…

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.

Can I interest you in some fresh alien urine? Still plenty saturated with Zephyron. I'll give you Dale Gribble's price! :)

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

#93

Post by dgrin91 »

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 can't tell if this is honest or sarcasm

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

#94

Post by ziddoap »

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 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.

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

#95

Post by LinuxBender »

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…

I enjoyed that show enough that I was willing to put up with Amazon's "Freevee" ads because they would not just let me buy the show. I've never done that with any other shows.

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

#96

Post by tptacek »

ziddoap wrote: post #94
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…

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.

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

#97

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#98

Post by jll29 »

kstrauser wrote: post #69
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…

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

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

#99

Post by [deleted] »

nabakin wrote: post #12
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 don't think I've ever seen the inside of an actual undercover van before. Crazy picture. Do we know anything else about them?

[deleted]

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

#100

Post by philipkglass »

genewitch wrote: post #87
aio2 wrote: post #2

Damn. I don't know if this started the whole movement or whatever you'd call it for this push towards privacy and the general public knowing about it, but it helped a lot. Before him releasing info about room 641A and whatever else, there really wasn't definitive evidence of any government spying and tampering, and either with the intention of starting this movement or simply letting people know, he was a big push in…

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 you phrased it as "I'm sure that the government is spying on everything," that went beyond the realm of what could be proved then, but airing suspicions about broad government snooping never elicited strong denials in my experience.

[0] Like the people on the Cypherpunks mailing list

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puzzle_Palace

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann#Arms_Export_Co...

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