The link: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70944-0.html
Hussain sent me the link above, and I began reading. I read the opening paragraph: “Former AT&T technician Mark Klein is the key witness in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's class-action lawsuit against the telecommunications company, which alleges that AT&T cooperated in an illegal National Security Agency domestic surveillance program.”
Then I said to Hussain: “Ok, I'm going to speculate here, before I read the article, that he can't actually point to anything illegal, and instead uses the word 'illegal' in the modern liberal vernacular, in which it means 'is a partisan talking point.'”
How right I was. Not only that, but Mr. Klein uses the keyword “Orwellian” not once, but twice. It should go without saying that anything Mr. Klein says will be in DeepPink.
In 2003 AT&T built "secret rooms" hidden deep in the bowels of its central offices in various cities, housing computer gear for a government spy operation which taps into the company's popular WorldNet service and the entire internet.
Already I can tell that Mr. Klein is a serious technical expert, because as anybody knows, evil rooms are always located in the bowels of a building.
In San Francisco the "secret room" is Room 641A at 611 Folsom Street, the site of a large SBC phone building, three floors of which are occupied by AT&T. High-speed fiber-optic circuits come in on the 8th floor and run down to the 7th floor where they connect to routers for AT&T's WorldNet service, part of the latter's vital "Common Backbone." In order to snoop on these circuits, a special cabinet was installed and cabled to the "secret room" on the 6th floor to monitor the information going through the circuits. (The location code of the cabinet is 070177.04, which denotes the 7th floor, aisle 177 and bay 04.)
This is hott. Internet “gurus” just love to get somebody's IP address and act like it's their whole life history, and via those four octets of power, they can call in satellite laser fire to vaporize the son of a bitch who dared suggest that WinOS was better than FreeBSD, or whatever. In this case, Klein is trying to gain nerd cred by knowing the exact cabinet in which evil dwells. I'm a little concerned with his accuracy here, though, since I see no mention of “bowels” in his notation. Shouldn't it be something like “07bowels0177.EvilBush.04?” I dunno, maybe my h4x aren't up to date.
Now, the big word in all of this is “illegal.” AT&T and the NSA are doing illegal stuff, and that's upsetting Mr. Klein. Clearly Mr. Klein is going to demonstrate the illegal activities going on, right?
You better believe it.
That's right, Mr. Klein has actual pictures of the Evil Door, which hides the “secret room.” Again, I'm concerned with the cleanliness and light colors of the area. It's not very bowel-like. But, clearly it's an Evil Door, and like all Evil Doors it has wheelchair access. I'm convinced. Well, ok, not yet, maybe you could insert the word “Orwellian” again?
This is the infrastructure for an Orwellian police state. It must be shut down!
Wonderful, thanks. At least he didn't mention “unjust war,” huh?
Now, look. The key word here is, and continues to be, “illegal.” People (and non-people, like Howard Dean) keep insisting it's an established fact that the NSA programs are illegal. And yet, nobody tries to put an end to them, and no legal basis for the allegation is provided. This article is three pages of prattle about a “secret room.” It doesn't even prove what's going on in the “secret room,” much less prove that it's in any way illegal.
I'm not an expert. I don't know for a fact that the NSA program is legal. I'm not saying that it definitely is legal. What I'm saying is that I've never seen any sort of effective demonstration that it is, and I know that there's many, many people who would love to see it demonstrated. What I have seen, instead, is three pages of a guy prattling about an Evil Door, pictures he took while lurking around outside it, and allegations as to what sort of hardware it might contain.
Oh well. I guess “illegal” is yet another word that has been sacrificed on the altar of partisan infighting.