NSA protest stirs up memories of AT&T spying scandal
It was a walk down memory lane for Mark Klein on Tuesday night, when a crowd gathered to hear him speak out, yet again, about the secret sharing of data between a top communications company and the US government.
Klein, a retired AT&T technician, leaked several internal AT&T documents in 2006 that showed that the NSA was collecting data from AT&T through a restricted room, 641A.
"I was wiring the Big Brother machine, which pissed me off," he said, standing outside of the AT&T building that he said houses 641A. Roughly 200 people gathered on the corner of the downtown San Francisco intersection to hear Klein speak as a part of "The Day We Fight Back," a campaign against mass surveillance from the government. Throughout the day, Internet activists placed nearly 80,000 calls and sent nearly 160,000 e-mails to their representatives in Congress to protest the NSA's tactics.
