"they’re doing a huge, massive domestic dragnet on everybody in the United States"

AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein to Senate: "they’re doing a huge, massive domestic dragnet on everybody in the United States" | Submitted by lambert on Wed, 2007-11-07 13:54.
...

My name’s Mark Klein; I used to be an AT&T technician for 22 years.

What I figured out when I got there [AT&’s secret room at 611 Folsom Street, SSan Francisco] is that they were copying everything flowing across the Internet cables, and the major Internet links between AT&T’s network and other company’s networks, and it struck me at the time that this is a massively unconstitutional, illegal operation.

It affects not only AT&T’s customers, but everybody, ‘cause these links went to places like Sprint, Qwest, a whole bunch of other companies, and so they’re basicallly tapping into the entire Internet.

But isn’t the government only monitoring suspected terrorsits and not ordinary Americans?

To perform what they say they want to do, which is look at international traffic, none of this makes any sense. These installations only make sense if they’re doing a huge, massive domestic dragnet on everybody, in the United States. ...