The

The The

The I'm going to be able to I'm going to

I'm going to

I'm going to Hello, welcome to Media Roots Radio. This is Ropi Martin. I will be joined by Abby Martin and Mark Klein, who was a former AT&T employee who blew the whistle on NSA

illegal bulk data collection back in 2004. Mark, why don't we, why don't we begin with you

just briefly describing your story about what you sought AT&T that made you blow the whistle.

Yeah, sure.

My story began back in 2002 when I was a technician in a small AT&T office in San Francisco,

just four technicians in the office.

And we got, in the summer of 2002, we got a email telling us openly that a representative of the

national security agency was coming to our office for something.

So that immediately tipped me off at something probably illegal was happening.

Because I knew from my memory of the 70s that the NSA has no business doing domestic

spying. Their chartered was foreign spying. So the guy showed up in our office.

He had to go talk to a management guy about something that we weren't privy to, obviously.

So we sort of forgot about it for a while, but we quickly got around that the NSA guy was talking to a management technician who was working

in a new room being built a few walks away at a office called 6-11 Folsom Street.

And over the next week's month, we found that this room was being installed,

that only this one guy could go into, none of the union techs could go into it. So we knew right

away that this was a secret NSA room being built. And the following year, 2003, I happened to be transferred to that office and was assigned

to oversee the Internet room.

...