Privacy's Defenders Podcast: The Secret Room
EFF's podcast series 'Privacy's Defenders' revisits the NSA mass surveillance revelations of the mid-2000s, focusing on the moment a retired AT&T technician named Mark Klein handed EFF documents exposing a secret government program to monitor Americans' communications after 9/11.
Why this matters: Klein's documents were not abstract policy. They described a physical room inside an AT&T facility where the NSA was routing Americans' internet traffic for collection. The government built this in secret. A newspaper sat on the story for over a year. An ordinary technician with a folder of printouts is what finally made it public. That chain of events tells you something about how surveillance accountability actually works, and how fragile it is.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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