14 ms·

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

1597 points by leotravis10 2y ago

hrhbbvjhcxb 2y ago
[dead]
aio2 2y ago
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 the right direction. tldr: he's a w
- genewitch 2y ago
  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.
  - philipkglass 2y ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puzzle_Palace [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann#Arms_Export_Control_Act_investigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann#Arms_Export_Co...
    - genewitch 2y ago
      > [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"
      - zmgsabst 2y ago
        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_(2001%E2%80%932007) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(... Lots of people knew that mass surveillance was likely with the advent of the internet, prior to 641A in 2006.
        somenameforme 2y ago
        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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
  - lern_too_spel 2y ago
    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.
    - rl3 2y ago
      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.
      - lern_too_spel 2y ago
        SMTP connections are wrapped in TLS these days, so even if you were to collect email transfers bit for bit, you wouldn't be able to read them, not even metadata.
        potato3732842 2y ago
        IIRC there's been speculation that the NSA can/has brute forced TLS keys up through 4096 bit size. I read a paper once that crunched the numbers on energy cost and compute time and whatnot it comes out looking like a reasonable investment for them. Obviously they'd have to keep such an exercise on the DL if they did do it because increasing key size is pretty trivial.
        kbolino 2y ago
        A 4096-bit RSA key is still well beyond the means of even a very capable state actor. The standard nowadays is 2048-bit RSA keys, cracking of which is also (probably) still beyond anyone's capabilities. Maybe a multi-year effort directed at a specific target might manage to crack a single key, but I wouldn't bet on it. RSA cracking efforts would almost certainly focus on smaller keys that are still being used despite the warnings. However, even if they did crack a major infrastructure provider's RSA key, TLS nowadays uses ephemeral key exchange which provides forward secrecy. So it doesn't matter if an intelligence agency collected every packet, they could not decipher the contents after the fact. They would have to actively interdict every TLS handshake and perform a man-in-the-middle attack against both parties all the time. It is extremely doubtful that this is happening en masse. Such a process would require an immense amount of online computing power directly in the path of all Internet traffic. Much of the compute available to intelligence agencies (and accounted for in back-of-the-envelope calculations by outside parties) is effectively offline due to airgaps. It's not like they want people doing to them what they're doing to others, after all. It's much easier to send an NSL to Google to read your email than to try to intercept it over the wire. The latter capability would be reserved for high-value targets unreachable by the US legal system, not mass surveillance.
  - nvarsj 2y ago
    It's pretty depressing how society went from "that would never happen" to general apathy.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - rcxdude 2y ago
    That's not the general sentiment I recall. There was a general sense of 'the government's probably watching' (along with who knows who else: early internet protocols like email really aren't resistant to snooping by more or less anyone), just no public info on specifically how (and you might get some disapproving looks if you claimed any specific approach without evidence).
    - abecedarius 2y ago
      It depends. If you were a hacker who'd read Bamford and the news from whistleblowers like Klein, talking with other hackers, that general sense was common knowledge. But if the topic came up in conversation with, like, the guy you're subletting a room from in NYC, you could get a very skeptical look. (I wonder if these people remembered those conversations after Snowden.)
  - potato3732842 2y ago
    That's a really charitable way of framing the fact that a 15% minority screeching about "the government would never" and "but there's no proof" was able to control the narrative despite people generally having doubt or believing otherwise privately right up until the point that the proof was public record and so ironclad that even mainstream media had to report on it. (I assume the 85% number is made up, but for whatever the number is the point stands)
- DoingIsLearning 2y ago
  > started the whole movement or whatever you'd call it for this push towards privacy I don't really like this framing because it makes it sound like if you care for privacy you are some form of fringe advocate. We should always try to reframe: Would you be ok with government employees or law enforcement indiscriminately opening your letters? Ask any senior and the answer is a clear no. So why are we discussing this as if privacy is entirely optional as soon as you change medium from written letters to emails, sms, instant message?
  - cj 2y ago
    I wonder what percent of Americans would trade their privacy to bring their monthly cell phone bill from $100/mo to $0/mo in exchange for sharing texts and emails with a telecom company. I suspect the percentage would be surprisingly high. Unfortunately normal people don’t really care that much about privacy (even if we all think everyone should).
    - 1oooqooq 2y ago
      you mean, exactly like most the public on this site did when moving from Gmail and abandoning their isp provided email?
      - lotsofpulp 2y ago
        Why would ISP provided email be any more private than Gmail? If anything, I expect ISP provided email to be more compromised.
        mulmen 2y ago
        Because it’s a lot easier to compromise one email provider instead of a million. I’m surprised I have to explain the benefits of federated over centralized systems here.
        1oooqooq 2y ago
        at&t main revenue channel wasn't selling you to advertisers before google showed them how profitable, and willingly everyone was.
- mulmen 2y ago
  The Fourth Amendment seems like a more appropriate starting point. Most people call the “privacy movement” “the American revolution“.
DannyBee 2y ago
RIP - truly someone who tried to make the world better.
madrox 2y ago
Had the privilege of watching him receive an award from EFF years ago at ETech. Gave a brief speech. Struck me as a gentle man who really did what he thought was right and for no other purpose. It took moral strength to do what he did. I hope he rests easy.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/02/t-whistleblower-wins-award https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/02/t-whistleblower-wins-a...
kstrauser 2y ago
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 https://honeypot.net/2025/03/12/rip-mark-klein.html
- itisit 2y ago
  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?
  - spaceribs 2y ago
    I'd like to believe it was an inspection van: https://nationalplant.com/services/digital-tv-inspection/ https://nationalplant.com/services/digital-tv-inspection/ I'd like to believe that, but I don't.
    - kstrauser 2y ago
      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 undercover NSA van. And yet, that's exactly what I thought it was from the moment I saw the gear racks and monitors inside.
      - Boogie_Man 2y ago
        Somebody give the number on the van a call and post results
toomuchtodo 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Klein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Klein https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/interviews/klein.html https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/interview... https://www.eff.org/document/public-unredacted-klein-declaration https://www.eff.org/document/public-unredacted-klein-declara... https://medium.com/@illicitpopsicle/mark-klein-the-nsa-whistleblower-time-ignored-bef594fb77db https://medium.com/@illicitpopsicle/mark-klein-the-nsa-whist... | https://archive.today/LlZSs https://archive.today/LlZSs https://medium.com/@chelsealynnqueen94/mark-klein-whistleblower-on-at-t-and-nsas-surveillance-partnership-2586b1ea809a https://medium.com/@chelsealynnqueen94/mark-klein-whistleblo... | https://archive.today/7RlfJ https://archive.today/7RlfJ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44edsh6_LUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44edsh6_LUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqeMkv5FHfU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqeMkv5FHfU (Senator Chris Dodd interviewed Mark, but the video is currently private unfortunately: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9aeKF-rOGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9aeKF-rOGA)
roenxi 2y ago
The tolerance for the US mass spying efforts remains weird. It undermines the credibility of many US politicians around Trump - yes the US public appears to be set to vote in Hitler-equivalents for the forseeable future. No, dismantling the insane spying apparatus is not a major agenda point. Marry those two ideas together.
- bloomingkales 2y ago
  It's pretty much a forgone conclusion since they are putting AI into every intersection. How are you going to argue against the fact that government AI needs your data for training?
- psadauskas 2y ago
  Its fine, as long as they're spying on the radical woke leftists. They'd never spy on one of the good guys like me! /s
dang 2y ago
Related. There were probably other relevant threads over the years—can anyone find some? Room 641A - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41507188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41507188 - Sept 2024 (5 comments) The secrets of Room 641A (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38305501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38305501 - Nov 2023 (4 comments) Room 641A - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32984515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32984515 - Sept 2022 (2 comments) Room 641A - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23350120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23350120 - May 2020 (70 comments) Room 641A - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12515724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12515724 - Sept 2016 (75 comments) Room 641A - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5847166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5847166 - June 2013 (44 comments)
- efeamzaov 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - codetrotter 2y ago
    I find it hilarious that this spam bot literally chose a comment by dang to respond with spam to. Doubly so when the account has one comment 14 days ago where someone else tried to mention dang to have him see the spam :D Fortune favors the bold, they say. But I think this takes “being bold” just a tad too literally lol.
- samstave 2y ago
  I knew I would be in that 2013 thread... I mistook the building, but I do remember details that Twitter had a direct fiber connection to that room... Also, we have a LOT of evidence of prior NSA backdoors and interceptions... in 1998 I had to hire a CSIE (cisco expert) (like a 3 digit uuid) to help me recover a router password from infra I inherited... and during the password reset procedure on a 3640 - he was telling me how "the NSA requires Cisco to put in back doors into all the routers) ((The passwd BTW was Feet4Monkey)) -- Then recall Carnivore? (and its predecessor eschelon - and a whole bunch of reveals) -- what was interesting was that the only company to refuse to install Carnivor was Earthlink.net (ISP) -- and the reason they stated they wouldnt put in Carnivore, was because they stated they already had their user tracking system (They were owned by the Mormon Church) ((and for some reason Whoopi Goldberg was one of their large notable investors)) And recall how they stated that the NSA specifically likes to hire Mormons? And recall North First Street DC that was purchased by Cerberus Group which was the ~Bush-Cabal hedgie, and the reason they bought it because it housed MAE WEST and they wanted to inject NBAR/Surveilling into it -- once they completed that, they sold it off again (To one of their subs, IIRC) I hate that I am getting old and I start to forget a lot of the malfeasance I have witnessed in my ~30+ years in SV.
rosegroove 2y ago
[flagged]
neil_s_anderson 2y ago
I find it odd how many people automatically assume that whatever the NSA is up to must be undesirable and therefore should be opposed. I mean, where do you think analysis of plans by terrorists and nation state adversaries to attack our nation and its allies comes from? The raw intelligence data these are based on can only be gathered by surveillance of communications, both targeted and in bulk. You should all be supporting this, as you benefit from it every day.
- rozap 2y ago
  Yea, it's a good thing that since we live in a democracy we'd never elect anyone with bad intentions. What a silly take.
- skoopie 2y ago
  We benefit from drug dealers too. They bring extra money into the community and they give rappers something to rap about.
- BobaFloutist 2y ago
  The point is that mass domestic surveillance of American nationals violates common understanding of the law. It makes no sense for the requirements to get a wiretap to be so stringent but the requirements to monitor someone's internet traffic to be nonexistent, just because it's laundered through "intelligence gathering" and you argue it's therefore not "law enforcement."
  - neil_s_anderson 2y ago
    The point of bulk data collection is to be able to, in effect, take a wiretap in the past before you knew what you'd need to be wiretapping in the present, by querying the bulk datasets for communications between specific endpoints within specific points in time. As time travel doesn't exist, this is the next best technology available.
    - ziddoap 2y ago
      I think we all know that. We, or I at least, don't agree with it.
AtomBalm 2y ago
He revealed unlawful surveillance years prior to and of the same gravity as Snowden, but only one became a celebrity. I would love to know the reason for that.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  I say this without intending to denigrate Snowden at all: Klein's situation was less messy. Snowden had a top secret clearance and vowed to safeguard all the secrets he came across. Klein was just a regular guy doing regular work for a regular company when he saw something strange. That doesn't mean I think Snowden was wrong, just that there's a ton of room for people to say "I agree with him but he shouldn't have done that because he swore not to". Klein didn't have those obligations.
  - marxisttemp 2y ago
    Likewise, Manning got pardoned when her release was clearly messier and less targeted than Snowden’s. There isn’t much logic to these things. To be clear, all 3 are personal heroes of mine.
    - psunavy03 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - booleandilemma 2y ago
        What do you think would have happened to Snowden had he stayed on American soil?
        adastra22 2y ago
        Treason has the death penalty.
        orthecreedence 2y ago
        He would have had a fair trial which would ultimately result in the dismantling of the entire US surveillance apparatus and would usher in the birth of the internet the forefathers intended.
jmpman 2y ago
I expect there were 10,000 who knew, and he’s the only one who spoke up. Now, the other 9,999 likely believed it was to thwart terrorism, as this was post 9/11. Maybe those who had visibility into who was being surveyed were checking to ensure the spying didn’t cross their ethical boundaries. Interesting to think of what each individual in the system was considering.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  Oh, I think it's much simpler: the other 9,999 didn't care enough to risk continued employment. Security today was dearer to them than the hypothetical benefits to strangers. (Perhaps worth noting: not to detract from what Mark did, but he was retired and therefore didn't have a job on the line. Credit to him for leveraging his position of privilege as a retiree to speak out about what he knew.)
- nabla9 2y ago
  >he’s the only one who spoke up. Not true. (1) Russ Tice: USAF intelligence analyst (2) William Binney: NSA Technical Director. (3) Thomas Tamm: DOJ lawyer (4) Thomas A. Drake: senior executive at NSA Each of them had a senior position relative Klein and Snowden and all these cases were shut down and you seemingly never knew about them.
  - jmpman 2y ago
    So what was different with Klein? He surfaced the information so widely that it couldn’t be contained by the “machine”?
    - az226 2y ago
      He wasn’t bound by the same clearance/confidentiality.
jypepin 2y ago
Is his book "Wiring Up The Big Brother Machine...And Fighting It" worth a read?
- leotravis10 2y ago
  Yes it is worth it, and most of it is still relevant today.
xyst 2y ago
NSA and AT&T (telecom in general?) caught with their pants down not just once, but twice. All of this heavily publicized yet here we are today with privacy being an afterthought in everyone’s mind. I hate to say it but the private corporations and state have really made most of the population complacent with wide net surveillance — cameras everywhere, privacy non-existent, “kyc”, “selfies”, social media, big tech creating profiles of users, and data brokerages selling and buying “anonymized” profiles.
djmips 2y ago
Age 79/80 ?
trescenzi 2y ago
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 a lot of good questions.
- ziddoap 2y ago
  I really enjoyed that show. Such a shame it was cancelled! Despite critical acclaim (in later seasons, at least), it apparently wasn't profitable enough. I actually tried to find a legal way to rewatch it the other day, but all of my current subscriptions list it with "rights expired" or some such.
- LinuxBender 2y ago
  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.
- choult 2y ago
  Oh dear... You should hear some of the stories about Jim Caviezel[0]... On second thought, maybe make up your own mind before you dip into that. [0] https://open.spotify.com/episode/1euFlDCuryFSzMw6BjQCWA https://open.spotify.com/episode/1euFlDCuryFSzMw6BjQCWA
  - trescenzi 2y ago
    Oh yea I always read about actors during commercial break. Was a bit startled when reading his Wikipedia.
- michh 2y ago
  It's weird how a lot of stuff in that show I dismissed as unrealistic techno-babble back then, now is very real.
rsingel 2y ago
R.I.P. He was a true and brave whistleblower. I had the luck of getting a hold of his docs when they were under court seal, and we published them at Wired. Only met and interviewed him later. He was a gentle man with a moral compass. A rarity even among whistleblowers. The world is poorer without him.
- HexPhantom 2y ago
  A gentle man with a strong moral compass
tehjoker 2y ago
It's crazy almost nothing changed after this revelation. What a fake democracy we live in.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  Or a real democracy with voters either deeply apathetic about being watched or deeply anxious about what happens if nobody's watching.
  - timeon 2y ago
    Real but too constrained with two-party system.
  - tehjoker 2y ago
    this comment would make sense if this was the only issue where this was true instead of one amongst almost an uncountable number
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      Vectors pointing in all directions can sum to zero. If people are generally dissatisfied, but can't find common ground to coalesce their dissatisfaction into action, movement, or party, the status quo vibrates but does not move. Broadly speaking, on one side of the aisle in the US I see people who refuse to coalesce, spend more time tearing at each other than figuring out how to work together, and find the entire idea of touching the system, let alone changing it, distasteful...And, sadly, on the other side I see a very successful coalition of surface-incompatible causes who figured out how to work together anyway and got their men elected.
      - tehjoker 2y ago
        what is missing from this surface level analysis is any real content about what the US government is, what it does in the world, the structure of the constitution, and the legacy of anti-democratic movements under the banner of anti-communism. All roads point to a conspiracy by the rich to deprive us of agency and sow death and destruction like a supervillian.
motohagiography 2y ago
A lot of influential people were quietly radicalized by Klein's disclosures and they took that forward in their ventures, careers, and lives. Change takes time, and almost two decades later, I think we are seeing the results of what those early voices in the wilderness were calling out. I hope on the other side of current bureaucratic reforms we can make a monument that includes Klein and the other surveillance whistleblowers whose disclosures, and specifically whose courage, turned the popular tide against government overreach.
cynicalpeace 2y ago
Tom Drake, John Kiriakou, Ed Snowden, Mark Klein. These are people that have shown that parts of the intelligence community are guilty of crimes against humanity and the American people. Yet every time more evidence comes out, people are so quick to dismiss it as "wacko conspiracy theories".
- sim7c00 2y ago
  they have done heroes jobs, but unfortunely the effect was that now its all become normal. ppl dont give a toss.. if you mention beam splitters on fiber, tap rooms at telcos, the 'black boxes' at ISPs.. people just pretend thats normal. they think most othe ppl are pedophiles, rapists and murderes somehow and so think its fine for everything to be tapped and logged. crazy world. these folks give up their remaining lives for the good of others, and the others just spit on it.
RoseGray 2y ago
[flagged]
samstave 2y ago
Needs black banner
CaffeineLD50 2y ago
Its not mass spying. The NSA is just making time capsule backups for everyone. Stop being so dramatic. In a hundred years when it gets published its gonna be the bomb hilarious. Totes.
unit149 2y ago
[dead]
cytocync 2y ago
[dead]
emmelaich 2y ago
Related, I'm rewatching "Enemy of the State" a 1998 film about government surveillance and assassinations and the deep state. Underrated in my opinion. Has Gene Hackman (also topical, which is why I am rewatching) and Will Smith. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)
- emmelaich 2y ago
  Pretty cool is that they mention Keyhole a few times. Keyhole (later Google Earth) was created a year later, in 1999.
  - willvarfar 2y ago
    The US camera surveillance satellites are called Key Hole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_Hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_Hole
  - defrost 2y ago
    As willvarfar points out, there's a satellite system from the 1960s and quite a gap from there until Keyhole Inc. Keyhole Inc. specialized in geospatial data visualization applications. The name "Keyhole" paid homage to the original KH reconnaissance satellites, also known as Corona satellites, which were operated by the U.S. between 1959 and 1972. ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#History Many companies operated in the gap, one in public was ERMapper (Earth Resources Mapping) which had Google Map like displays in the early 1990s and was mainly focussed on geospatial computing - stitching and correcting air and sat images, multispectral data with nonstandard nonlinear geocords, magnetic and radiometric displays and corrections, etc. Other such suites existed at that time. Keyhole|Google Earth was not the first, it was the one that went very widely public.
artursapek 2y ago
RIP
zombot 2y ago
> who risked civil liability and criminal prosecution to help expose a massive spying program that violated the rights of millions of Americans. That's how corrupt the system is. You get punished for revealing crimes against everyone. Who is going to erect statues for him and people like him?
- PostOnce 2y ago
  We could do it. We could fundraise to cast a bronze of him and put it anywhere we like. It wouldn't take that many people or that much time, in the grand scheme of things. Actually, the world might be a nicer place with more statues and less goofy abstract modernist art in public for even more money than bronzes.
  - krunck 2y ago
    Put it right in the middle of Trump's "National Garden of American Heroes"[1] He'd love that. Ha! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Garden_of_American_Heroes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Garden_of_American_He...
- hulitu 2y ago
  > Who is going to erect statues for him and people like him? Usually, one has to kill some people to have a statue erected for him. /s
kleiba 2y ago
This is the sentence I was looking for: > While we were able to use his evidence to make some change, both EFF and Mark were ultimately let down by Congress and the Courts, which have refused to take the steps necessary to end the mass spying even after Edward Snowden provided even more evidence of it in 2013. Do you have to be a cynic to pretty much have expected this?
- fsflover 2y ago
  Unfortunately this spying is exactly what all the government wants, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    It's also hard to make the case that it isn't, ultimately, what the people want, by "the standard you walk past is the standard you accept" principle. It's been nearly twenty years. If Americans were deeply, deeply bothered by the government spying on them, they'd have burned down this government by now. At most charitable, this speaks to a deep ignorance or apathy in the American electorate and American citizenship. Or a general anxiety about what "the other people" are doing that exceeds their anxiety about what the government can do with panopticon surveillance. I think, in general, hackers vastly overestimate the average human concern or sensitivity to this kind of thing.
    - gosub100 2y ago
      Victim blaming. "How dare you get victimized and not do more to stop it?"
      - shadowgovt 2y ago
        Victims have to be victimized first. Most surveilled Americans feel about as victimized as a well-kept dog.
    - fsflover 2y ago
HexPhantom 2y ago
Mark Klein was just a guy doing his job... until he saw something he couldn't ignore. He didn't have to speak up. He could have walked away, lived his life, and let someone else deal with it. But he didn't. Rest in peace, Mark
BiteCode_dev 2y ago
I'm expecting nobody will do that anymore in the US. First, those heroes were treated as enemies, then their revelations lead to nothing for the country, and great pain for them. Finally, I doubt they would be proud of what their country is today and think it's worth the sacrifice.
INTPenis 2y ago
Rest in peace sweet prince. I'll never forget this discovery, it was probably my first realization that whatever is possible technically is most likely being done somewhere to exert power over people. And in this case most people in tech knew you could split a network backbone, and if you can do it then most likely someone is doing it. But Mark actually brought it into the light. And that's what we can't forget in 2025, that whatever is possible technically is most likely being done by someone somewhere. Today it would be using AI to oppress people, track citizens, predict crimes, accuse people of crimes they might commit, or whatever your imagination anchored in technical reality can picture.
user99999999 2y ago
RIP to privacy too
yaspersian 2y ago
[dead]
heraldgeezer 2y ago
Such a different time. I got kind of anti-american after that but now with the world I am 100% pro USA/EU/Western world and Israel because the others are much worse. Much, much worse.
curtisszmania 2y ago
[dead]
krunck 2y ago
I am thankful for what he did. We need more Mark Kleins.
7e 2y ago
The NSA’s Upstream program primarily targeted foreign communications under the authority of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. However, it also incidentally collected data from U.S. citizens, particularly when their communications were intercepted while in contact with foreign targets. The court cases were thrown out because of congressional action, as they should be, because the entire purpose of the NSA is to spy on foreigners. Thus these programs were legal and this whistleblowing was not, in fact, whistleblowing at all, just leaks of classified information.
Integrape 2y ago
Does this not count as a political post? It would have been flagged if the title had DOGE instead of NSA.
neilv 2y ago
Side comment about suboptimal HN commenting or UI... This post is about someone noteworthy dying, but the top relevant comment is followed by over a dozen screenfulls of text about a sewer inspection van, before you get to anything else. If you start paging through it, do you close the browser tab in annoyance before you get to any further discussion of the person and why they're noteworthy? > 4. Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died (eff.org) 1404 points by leotravis10 20 hours ago | flag | hide | 306 comments
- 0xffff2 2y ago
  Are you aware that you can collapse comments chains?
  - neilv 2y ago
    Yes, or go up and hit "next", but I don't normally have to on HN. With the mouse-over-to-and-click-on-tiny-gray-link UI, it's usually faster to autoscroll/scrollwheel or hit PgDn. So if you start doing the usual way, and it's not working, that's frustration with the post. And is it worth your time to figure out where to prune/skip within the tree, when you have to go navigate to the tree links. And probably have hide/next/prev multiple times, to get past the entire tree from where you realize. If people had more UI-efficient tree operations (like in past threading newsreaders), and knew how to use them, then it would be easier. But with what we have, we can get important posts where important comments are effectively suppressed, for many readers, just by putting a dozen pages of frustrating distraction in front of them.
    - fsflover 2y ago
      This is why I downvoted the first comment.
heavymetalpoizn 2y ago
[dead]
thuanao 2y ago
Where's the best overview of this whole NSA mass spying story, starting from 9/11 era and the beginning of the dotcom boom? Any good books or documentaries?

1597 points by leotravis10 2y ago

[dead]

aio2 2y ago

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 the right direction. tldr: he's a w

genewitch 2y ago
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.
- philipkglass 2y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puzzle_Palace [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann#Arms_Export_Control_Act_investigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann#Arms_Export_Co...
  - genewitch 2y ago
    > [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"
    - zmgsabst 2y ago
      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_(2001%E2%80%932007) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(... Lots of people knew that mass surveillance was likely with the advent of the internet, prior to 641A in 2006.
      - somenameforme 2y ago
        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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
- lern_too_spel 2y ago
  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.
  - rl3 2y ago
    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.
    - lern_too_spel 2y ago
      SMTP connections are wrapped in TLS these days, so even if you were to collect email transfers bit for bit, you wouldn't be able to read them, not even metadata.
      - potato3732842 2y ago
        IIRC there's been speculation that the NSA can/has brute forced TLS keys up through 4096 bit size. I read a paper once that crunched the numbers on energy cost and compute time and whatnot it comes out looking like a reasonable investment for them. Obviously they'd have to keep such an exercise on the DL if they did do it because increasing key size is pretty trivial.
        kbolino 2y ago
        A 4096-bit RSA key is still well beyond the means of even a very capable state actor. The standard nowadays is 2048-bit RSA keys, cracking of which is also (probably) still beyond anyone's capabilities. Maybe a multi-year effort directed at a specific target might manage to crack a single key, but I wouldn't bet on it. RSA cracking efforts would almost certainly focus on smaller keys that are still being used despite the warnings. However, even if they did crack a major infrastructure provider's RSA key, TLS nowadays uses ephemeral key exchange which provides forward secrecy. So it doesn't matter if an intelligence agency collected every packet, they could not decipher the contents after the fact. They would have to actively interdict every TLS handshake and perform a man-in-the-middle attack against both parties all the time. It is extremely doubtful that this is happening en masse. Such a process would require an immense amount of online computing power directly in the path of all Internet traffic. Much of the compute available to intelligence agencies (and accounted for in back-of-the-envelope calculations by outside parties) is effectively offline due to airgaps. It's not like they want people doing to them what they're doing to others, after all. It's much easier to send an NSL to Google to read your email than to try to intercept it over the wire. The latter capability would be reserved for high-value targets unreachable by the US legal system, not mass surveillance.
- nvarsj 2y ago
  It's pretty depressing how society went from "that would never happen" to general apathy.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- rcxdude 2y ago
  That's not the general sentiment I recall. There was a general sense of 'the government's probably watching' (along with who knows who else: early internet protocols like email really aren't resistant to snooping by more or less anyone), just no public info on specifically how (and you might get some disapproving looks if you claimed any specific approach without evidence).
  - abecedarius 2y ago
    It depends. If you were a hacker who'd read Bamford and the news from whistleblowers like Klein, talking with other hackers, that general sense was common knowledge. But if the topic came up in conversation with, like, the guy you're subletting a room from in NYC, you could get a very skeptical look. (I wonder if these people remembered those conversations after Snowden.)
- potato3732842 2y ago
  That's a really charitable way of framing the fact that a 15% minority screeching about "the government would never" and "but there's no proof" was able to control the narrative despite people generally having doubt or believing otherwise privately right up until the point that the proof was public record and so ironclad that even mainstream media had to report on it. (I assume the 85% number is made up, but for whatever the number is the point stands)
DoingIsLearning 2y ago
> started the whole movement or whatever you'd call it for this push towards privacy I don't really like this framing because it makes it sound like if you care for privacy you are some form of fringe advocate. We should always try to reframe: Would you be ok with government employees or law enforcement indiscriminately opening your letters? Ask any senior and the answer is a clear no. So why are we discussing this as if privacy is entirely optional as soon as you change medium from written letters to emails, sms, instant message?
- cj 2y ago
  I wonder what percent of Americans would trade their privacy to bring their monthly cell phone bill from $100/mo to $0/mo in exchange for sharing texts and emails with a telecom company. I suspect the percentage would be surprisingly high. Unfortunately normal people don’t really care that much about privacy (even if we all think everyone should).
  - 1oooqooq 2y ago
    you mean, exactly like most the public on this site did when moving from Gmail and abandoning their isp provided email?
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      Why would ISP provided email be any more private than Gmail? If anything, I expect ISP provided email to be more compromised.
      - mulmen 2y ago
        Because it’s a lot easier to compromise one email provider instead of a million. I’m surprised I have to explain the benefits of federated over centralized systems here.
      - 1oooqooq 2y ago
        at&t main revenue channel wasn't selling you to advertisers before google showed them how profitable, and willingly everyone was.
mulmen 2y ago
The Fourth Amendment seems like a more appropriate starting point. Most people call the “privacy movement” “the American revolution“.

DannyBee 2y ago

RIP - truly someone who tried to make the world better.

madrox 2y ago

Had the privilege of watching him receive an award from EFF years ago at ETech. Gave a brief speech. Struck me as a gentle man who really did what he thought was right and for no other purpose. It took moral strength to do what he did. I hope he rests easy.

toomuchtodo 2y ago
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/02/t-whistleblower-wins-award https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/02/t-whistleblower-wins-a...

kstrauser 2y ago

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 https://honeypot.net/2025/03/12/rip-mark-klein.html

itisit 2y ago
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?
- spaceribs 2y ago
  I'd like to believe it was an inspection van: https://nationalplant.com/services/digital-tv-inspection/ https://nationalplant.com/services/digital-tv-inspection/ I'd like to believe that, but I don't.
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    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 undercover NSA van. And yet, that's exactly what I thought it was from the moment I saw the gear racks and monitors inside.
    - Boogie_Man 2y ago
      Somebody give the number on the van a call and post results

toomuchtodo 2y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Klein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Klein https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/interviews/klein.html https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/interview... https://www.eff.org/document/public-unredacted-klein-declaration https://www.eff.org/document/public-unredacted-klein-declara... https://medium.com/@illicitpopsicle/mark-klein-the-nsa-whistleblower-time-ignored-bef594fb77db https://medium.com/@illicitpopsicle/mark-klein-the-nsa-whist... | https://archive.today/LlZSs https://archive.today/LlZSs https://medium.com/@chelsealynnqueen94/mark-klein-whistleblower-on-at-t-and-nsas-surveillance-partnership-2586b1ea809a https://medium.com/@chelsealynnqueen94/mark-klein-whistleblo... | https://archive.today/7RlfJ https://archive.today/7RlfJ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44edsh6_LUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44edsh6_LUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqeMkv5FHfU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqeMkv5FHfU (Senator Chris Dodd interviewed Mark, but the video is currently private unfortunately: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9aeKF-rOGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9aeKF-rOGA)

roenxi 2y ago

The tolerance for the US mass spying efforts remains weird. It undermines the credibility of many US politicians around Trump - yes the US public appears to be set to vote in Hitler-equivalents for the forseeable future. No, dismantling the insane spying apparatus is not a major agenda point. Marry those two ideas together.

bloomingkales 2y ago
It's pretty much a forgone conclusion since they are putting AI into every intersection. How are you going to argue against the fact that government AI needs your data for training?
psadauskas 2y ago
Its fine, as long as they're spying on the radical woke leftists. They'd never spy on one of the good guys like me! /s

dang 2y ago

Related. There were probably other relevant threads over the years—can anyone find some? Room 641A - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41507188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41507188 - Sept 2024 (5 comments) The secrets of Room 641A (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38305501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38305501 - Nov 2023 (4 comments) Room 641A - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32984515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32984515 - Sept 2022 (2 comments) Room 641A - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23350120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23350120 - May 2020 (70 comments) Room 641A - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12515724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12515724 - Sept 2016 (75 comments) Room 641A - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5847166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5847166 - June 2013 (44 comments)

efeamzaov 2y ago
[flagged]
- codetrotter 2y ago
  I find it hilarious that this spam bot literally chose a comment by dang to respond with spam to. Doubly so when the account has one comment 14 days ago where someone else tried to mention dang to have him see the spam :D Fortune favors the bold, they say. But I think this takes “being bold” just a tad too literally lol.
samstave 2y ago
I knew I would be in that 2013 thread... I mistook the building, but I do remember details that Twitter had a direct fiber connection to that room... Also, we have a LOT of evidence of prior NSA backdoors and interceptions... in 1998 I had to hire a CSIE (cisco expert) (like a 3 digit uuid) to help me recover a router password from infra I inherited... and during the password reset procedure on a 3640 - he was telling me how "the NSA requires Cisco to put in back doors into all the routers) ((The passwd BTW was Feet4Monkey)) -- Then recall Carnivore? (and its predecessor eschelon - and a whole bunch of reveals) -- what was interesting was that the only company to refuse to install Carnivor was Earthlink.net (ISP) -- and the reason they stated they wouldnt put in Carnivore, was because they stated they already had their user tracking system (They were owned by the Mormon Church) ((and for some reason Whoopi Goldberg was one of their large notable investors)) And recall how they stated that the NSA specifically likes to hire Mormons? And recall North First Street DC that was purchased by Cerberus Group which was the ~Bush-Cabal hedgie, and the reason they bought it because it housed MAE WEST and they wanted to inject NBAR/Surveilling into it -- once they completed that, they sold it off again (To one of their subs, IIRC) I hate that I am getting old and I start to forget a lot of the malfeasance I have witnessed in my ~30+ years in SV.

rosegroove 2y ago

[flagged]

neil_s_anderson 2y ago

I find it odd how many people automatically assume that whatever the NSA is up to must be undesirable and therefore should be opposed. I mean, where do you think analysis of plans by terrorists and nation state adversaries to attack our nation and its allies comes from? The raw intelligence data these are based on can only be gathered by surveillance of communications, both targeted and in bulk. You should all be supporting this, as you benefit from it every day.

rozap 2y ago
Yea, it's a good thing that since we live in a democracy we'd never elect anyone with bad intentions. What a silly take.
skoopie 2y ago
We benefit from drug dealers too. They bring extra money into the community and they give rappers something to rap about.
BobaFloutist 2y ago
The point is that mass domestic surveillance of American nationals violates common understanding of the law. It makes no sense for the requirements to get a wiretap to be so stringent but the requirements to monitor someone's internet traffic to be nonexistent, just because it's laundered through "intelligence gathering" and you argue it's therefore not "law enforcement."
- neil_s_anderson 2y ago
  The point of bulk data collection is to be able to, in effect, take a wiretap in the past before you knew what you'd need to be wiretapping in the present, by querying the bulk datasets for communications between specific endpoints within specific points in time. As time travel doesn't exist, this is the next best technology available.
  - ziddoap 2y ago
    I think we all know that. We, or I at least, don't agree with it.

AtomBalm 2y ago

He revealed unlawful surveillance years prior to and of the same gravity as Snowden, but only one became a celebrity. I would love to know the reason for that.

kstrauser 2y ago
I say this without intending to denigrate Snowden at all: Klein's situation was less messy. Snowden had a top secret clearance and vowed to safeguard all the secrets he came across. Klein was just a regular guy doing regular work for a regular company when he saw something strange. That doesn't mean I think Snowden was wrong, just that there's a ton of room for people to say "I agree with him but he shouldn't have done that because he swore not to". Klein didn't have those obligations.
- marxisttemp 2y ago
  Likewise, Manning got pardoned when her release was clearly messier and less targeted than Snowden’s. There isn’t much logic to these things. To be clear, all 3 are personal heroes of mine.
  - psunavy03 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - booleandilemma 2y ago
      What do you think would have happened to Snowden had he stayed on American soil?
      - adastra22 2y ago
        Treason has the death penalty.
      - orthecreedence 2y ago
        He would have had a fair trial which would ultimately result in the dismantling of the entire US surveillance apparatus and would usher in the birth of the internet the forefathers intended.

jmpman 2y ago

I expect there were 10,000 who knew, and he’s the only one who spoke up. Now, the other 9,999 likely believed it was to thwart terrorism, as this was post 9/11. Maybe those who had visibility into who was being surveyed were checking to ensure the spying didn’t cross their ethical boundaries. Interesting to think of what each individual in the system was considering.

shadowgovt 2y ago
Oh, I think it's much simpler: the other 9,999 didn't care enough to risk continued employment. Security today was dearer to them than the hypothetical benefits to strangers. (Perhaps worth noting: not to detract from what Mark did, but he was retired and therefore didn't have a job on the line. Credit to him for leveraging his position of privilege as a retiree to speak out about what he knew.)
nabla9 2y ago
>he’s the only one who spoke up. Not true. (1) Russ Tice: USAF intelligence analyst (2) William Binney: NSA Technical Director. (3) Thomas Tamm: DOJ lawyer (4) Thomas A. Drake: senior executive at NSA Each of them had a senior position relative Klein and Snowden and all these cases were shut down and you seemingly never knew about them.
- jmpman 2y ago
  So what was different with Klein? He surfaced the information so widely that it couldn’t be contained by the “machine”?
  - az226 2y ago
    He wasn’t bound by the same clearance/confidentiality.

jypepin 2y ago

Is his book "Wiring Up The Big Brother Machine...And Fighting It" worth a read?

leotravis10 2y ago
Yes it is worth it, and most of it is still relevant today.

xyst 2y ago

NSA and AT&T (telecom in general?) caught with their pants down not just once, but twice. All of this heavily publicized yet here we are today with privacy being an afterthought in everyone’s mind. I hate to say it but the private corporations and state have really made most of the population complacent with wide net surveillance — cameras everywhere, privacy non-existent, “kyc”, “selfies”, social media, big tech creating profiles of users, and data brokerages selling and buying “anonymized” profiles.

djmips 2y ago

Age 79/80 ?

trescenzi 2y ago

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 a lot of good questions.

ziddoap 2y ago
I really enjoyed that show. Such a shame it was cancelled! Despite critical acclaim (in later seasons, at least), it apparently wasn't profitable enough. I actually tried to find a legal way to rewatch it the other day, but all of my current subscriptions list it with "rights expired" or some such.
LinuxBender 2y ago
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.
choult 2y ago
Oh dear... You should hear some of the stories about Jim Caviezel[0]... On second thought, maybe make up your own mind before you dip into that. [0] https://open.spotify.com/episode/1euFlDCuryFSzMw6BjQCWA https://open.spotify.com/episode/1euFlDCuryFSzMw6BjQCWA
- trescenzi 2y ago
  Oh yea I always read about actors during commercial break. Was a bit startled when reading his Wikipedia.
michh 2y ago
It's weird how a lot of stuff in that show I dismissed as unrealistic techno-babble back then, now is very real.

rsingel 2y ago

R.I.P. He was a true and brave whistleblower. I had the luck of getting a hold of his docs when they were under court seal, and we published them at Wired. Only met and interviewed him later. He was a gentle man with a moral compass. A rarity even among whistleblowers. The world is poorer without him.

HexPhantom 2y ago
A gentle man with a strong moral compass

tehjoker 2y ago

It's crazy almost nothing changed after this revelation. What a fake democracy we live in.

shadowgovt 2y ago
Or a real democracy with voters either deeply apathetic about being watched or deeply anxious about what happens if nobody's watching.
- timeon 2y ago
  Real but too constrained with two-party system.
- tehjoker 2y ago
  this comment would make sense if this was the only issue where this was true instead of one amongst almost an uncountable number
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    Vectors pointing in all directions can sum to zero. If people are generally dissatisfied, but can't find common ground to coalesce their dissatisfaction into action, movement, or party, the status quo vibrates but does not move. Broadly speaking, on one side of the aisle in the US I see people who refuse to coalesce, spend more time tearing at each other than figuring out how to work together, and find the entire idea of touching the system, let alone changing it, distasteful...And, sadly, on the other side I see a very successful coalition of surface-incompatible causes who figured out how to work together anyway and got their men elected.
    - tehjoker 2y ago
      what is missing from this surface level analysis is any real content about what the US government is, what it does in the world, the structure of the constitution, and the legacy of anti-democratic movements under the banner of anti-communism. All roads point to a conspiracy by the rich to deprive us of agency and sow death and destruction like a supervillian.

motohagiography 2y ago

A lot of influential people were quietly radicalized by Klein's disclosures and they took that forward in their ventures, careers, and lives. Change takes time, and almost two decades later, I think we are seeing the results of what those early voices in the wilderness were calling out. I hope on the other side of current bureaucratic reforms we can make a monument that includes Klein and the other surveillance whistleblowers whose disclosures, and specifically whose courage, turned the popular tide against government overreach.

cynicalpeace 2y ago

Tom Drake, John Kiriakou, Ed Snowden, Mark Klein. These are people that have shown that parts of the intelligence community are guilty of crimes against humanity and the American people. Yet every time more evidence comes out, people are so quick to dismiss it as "wacko conspiracy theories".

sim7c00 2y ago
they have done heroes jobs, but unfortunely the effect was that now its all become normal. ppl dont give a toss.. if you mention beam splitters on fiber, tap rooms at telcos, the 'black boxes' at ISPs.. people just pretend thats normal. they think most othe ppl are pedophiles, rapists and murderes somehow and so think its fine for everything to be tapped and logged. crazy world. these folks give up their remaining lives for the good of others, and the others just spit on it.

RoseGray 2y ago

[flagged]

samstave 2y ago

Needs black banner

CaffeineLD50 2y ago

Its not mass spying. The NSA is just making time capsule backups for everyone. Stop being so dramatic. In a hundred years when it gets published its gonna be the bomb hilarious. Totes.

unit149 2y ago

[dead]

cytocync 2y ago

[dead]

emmelaich 2y ago

Related, I'm rewatching "Enemy of the State" a 1998 film about government surveillance and assassinations and the deep state. Underrated in my opinion. Has Gene Hackman (also topical, which is why I am rewatching) and Will Smith. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)

emmelaich 2y ago
Pretty cool is that they mention Keyhole a few times. Keyhole (later Google Earth) was created a year later, in 1999.
- willvarfar 2y ago
  The US camera surveillance satellites are called Key Hole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_Hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_Hole
- defrost 2y ago
  As willvarfar points out, there's a satellite system from the 1960s and quite a gap from there until Keyhole Inc. Keyhole Inc. specialized in geospatial data visualization applications. The name "Keyhole" paid homage to the original KH reconnaissance satellites, also known as Corona satellites, which were operated by the U.S. between 1959 and 1972. ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#History Many companies operated in the gap, one in public was ERMapper (Earth Resources Mapping) which had Google Map like displays in the early 1990s and was mainly focussed on geospatial computing - stitching and correcting air and sat images, multispectral data with nonstandard nonlinear geocords, magnetic and radiometric displays and corrections, etc. Other such suites existed at that time. Keyhole|Google Earth was not the first, it was the one that went very widely public.

artursapek 2y ago

RIP

zombot 2y ago

> who risked civil liability and criminal prosecution to help expose a massive spying program that violated the rights of millions of Americans. That's how corrupt the system is. You get punished for revealing crimes against everyone. Who is going to erect statues for him and people like him?

PostOnce 2y ago
We could do it. We could fundraise to cast a bronze of him and put it anywhere we like. It wouldn't take that many people or that much time, in the grand scheme of things. Actually, the world might be a nicer place with more statues and less goofy abstract modernist art in public for even more money than bronzes.
- krunck 2y ago
  Put it right in the middle of Trump's "National Garden of American Heroes"[1] He'd love that. Ha! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Garden_of_American_Heroes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Garden_of_American_He...
hulitu 2y ago
> Who is going to erect statues for him and people like him? Usually, one has to kill some people to have a statue erected for him. /s

kleiba 2y ago

This is the sentence I was looking for: > While we were able to use his evidence to make some change, both EFF and Mark were ultimately let down by Congress and the Courts, which have refused to take the steps necessary to end the mass spying even after Edward Snowden provided even more evidence of it in 2013. Do you have to be a cynic to pretty much have expected this?

fsflover 2y ago
Unfortunately this spying is exactly what all the government wants, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  It's also hard to make the case that it isn't, ultimately, what the people want, by "the standard you walk past is the standard you accept" principle. It's been nearly twenty years. If Americans were deeply, deeply bothered by the government spying on them, they'd have burned down this government by now. At most charitable, this speaks to a deep ignorance or apathy in the American electorate and American citizenship. Or a general anxiety about what "the other people" are doing that exceeds their anxiety about what the government can do with panopticon surveillance. I think, in general, hackers vastly overestimate the average human concern or sensitivity to this kind of thing.
  - gosub100 2y ago
    Victim blaming. "How dare you get victimized and not do more to stop it?"
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      Victims have to be victimized first. Most surveilled Americans feel about as victimized as a well-kept dog.
  - fsflover 2y ago

HexPhantom 2y ago

Mark Klein was just a guy doing his job... until he saw something he couldn't ignore. He didn't have to speak up. He could have walked away, lived his life, and let someone else deal with it. But he didn't. Rest in peace, Mark

BiteCode_dev 2y ago

I'm expecting nobody will do that anymore in the US. First, those heroes were treated as enemies, then their revelations lead to nothing for the country, and great pain for them. Finally, I doubt they would be proud of what their country is today and think it's worth the sacrifice.

INTPenis 2y ago

Rest in peace sweet prince. I'll never forget this discovery, it was probably my first realization that whatever is possible technically is most likely being done somewhere to exert power over people. And in this case most people in tech knew you could split a network backbone, and if you can do it then most likely someone is doing it. But Mark actually brought it into the light. And that's what we can't forget in 2025, that whatever is possible technically is most likely being done by someone somewhere. Today it would be using AI to oppress people, track citizens, predict crimes, accuse people of crimes they might commit, or whatever your imagination anchored in technical reality can picture.

user99999999 2y ago

RIP to privacy too

yaspersian 2y ago

[dead]

heraldgeezer 2y ago

Such a different time. I got kind of anti-american after that but now with the world I am 100% pro USA/EU/Western world and Israel because the others are much worse. Much, much worse.

curtisszmania 2y ago

[dead]

krunck 2y ago

I am thankful for what he did. We need more Mark Kleins.

7e 2y ago

The NSA’s Upstream program primarily targeted foreign communications under the authority of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. However, it also incidentally collected data from U.S. citizens, particularly when their communications were intercepted while in contact with foreign targets. The court cases were thrown out because of congressional action, as they should be, because the entire purpose of the NSA is to spy on foreigners. Thus these programs were legal and this whistleblowing was not, in fact, whistleblowing at all, just leaks of classified information.

Integrape 2y ago

Does this not count as a political post? It would have been flagged if the title had DOGE instead of NSA.

neilv 2y ago

Side comment about suboptimal HN commenting or UI... This post is about someone noteworthy dying, but the top relevant comment is followed by over a dozen screenfulls of text about a sewer inspection van, before you get to anything else. If you start paging through it, do you close the browser tab in annoyance before you get to any further discussion of the person and why they're noteworthy? > 4. Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died (eff.org) 1404 points by leotravis10 20 hours ago | flag | hide | 306 comments

0xffff2 2y ago
Are you aware that you can collapse comments chains?
- neilv 2y ago
  Yes, or go up and hit "next", but I don't normally have to on HN. With the mouse-over-to-and-click-on-tiny-gray-link UI, it's usually faster to autoscroll/scrollwheel or hit PgDn. So if you start doing the usual way, and it's not working, that's frustration with the post. And is it worth your time to figure out where to prune/skip within the tree, when you have to go navigate to the tree links. And probably have hide/next/prev multiple times, to get past the entire tree from where you realize. If people had more UI-efficient tree operations (like in past threading newsreaders), and knew how to use them, then it would be easier. But with what we have, we can get important posts where important comments are effectively suppressed, for many readers, just by putting a dozen pages of frustrating distraction in front of them.
  - fsflover 2y ago
    This is why I downvoted the first comment.

heavymetalpoizn 2y ago

[dead]

thuanao 2y ago

Where's the best overview of this whole NSA mass spying story, starting from 9/11 era and the beginning of the dotcom boom? Any good books or documentaries?