Mark Klein passed away in March 2025 at the age of 79.^[1] By all accounts and videos, he seemed an outwardly unexceptional man–modest in his appearance and demeanor, and humble in his self-presentation.^[2] At the time he would step briefly into the public spotlight, he was the last to imagine or desire it–already on the verge of retirement from a long, steady, and relatively uneventful career as a telecommunication technician. Nonetheless, courageously acting on his own, before Snowden, before Assange, and before Manning, he was one of great whistleblowers of the 2000s–if not the most famous or flamboyant, certainly the most careful, thorough, and professional in his task. While other whistleblowers at the time were able to reveal the NSA’s spying program in broad strokes, it was Klein’s technical documentation of AT&T’s “Room 641A” and expertise that was able to prove they were not “selectively” tapping the internet, as they claimed, but in fact accessing and copying the whole of its traffic.

His discovery of domestic surveillance and subsequent efforts to reveal it to the public are recorded in his 2009 book Wiring Up The Big Brother Machine… And Fighting It–a slim volume that is as meticulous as his technical work or his whistleblowing itself.^[3] As he recounts, this manuscript was eventually self-published, as every major publisher found it too hot to handle. Its rocky road to publication is a story in miniature of what Klein encountered throughout his attempts to bring the massive post-9/11 internet surveillance machine to light.

Not a military or NSA employee like the other whistleblowers of the time, Klein was simply a private citizen who happened to work for AT&T and was assigned to the facility where, in 2002, it installed special hardware from the NSA to “tap” the whole of the internet. Over the course of the following year he pieced together the true purpose of the secret room where the hardware was placed. Unwilling to support such work but fearful of speaking out, he retired in 2004. Finally, in late 2005, the New York Times broke a story on warrantless wiretaps.^[4] Convinced that what he had seen was related, Klein resolved to come forward. Time and again, newspapers and public officials were presented with irrefutable documentation of corporate collusion with the security state to violate the bill of rights, then looked the other way.

Yet Klein persisted and eventually connected with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in early 2006. Understanding the value of Klein’s information, they then proceeded to use his material in two lawsuits against the government, as well as to publicize it as part of a broader campaign. Klein preserved his safety and freedom, even while bringing the story he had to tell to network TV and the halls of Congress. However, by 2008, the government turned around and passed retroactive immunity for all those involved, proceeding to trample basic civil liberties. The remaining hundred pages of the book is consumed by documentation of that whistleblowing–from legal affidavits to wiring diagrams. It speaks to a commitment to make the historic record and set facts straight–all the more poignant from someone who saw them repeatedly effaced and denied.

For a book about an act of heroism, Klein’s account is uniquely self-effacing. Unlike Assange he did not seek to make himself a dashing outspoken hero, or the face of a movement or moment. If anything, the Electronic Frontier Foundation had to cajole him into eventually testifying before Congress. His victory, to the extent he won anything, is that he was able to make his case publicly, then go back to retire in peace, enjoying his remaining twenty years quitely, and mostly with his wife and companion Linda, who died in 2023. There is a sense in which the book is a political thriller, but its bones are too subtle for the movies. There are intense moments described to be sure–not for anything that occurs, but for what could have. As Klein began to shop around the documentation he had collected proving definitively a secret domestic surveillance program existed, he found journalists who wrote stories only to have them killed by editors, politicians who sounded sympathetic only to suddenly cut all contact–the hidden hand of an adversary with vast and unknown powers, prepared to go to unknown lengths to silence him.

So why return to this work nearly twenty years later, other than to mourn a forgotten “little guy” who stood up? There are lessons for today–for one, how to be meticulous in documenting things, and patient in making a case. He also demonstrated how to act judiciously and with legal counsel to not get hauled away to jail–and to force a story to the center of national news. Lastly, while Klein’s writing goes light on his biography, it hints at where such acts of courage come from, mentioning how in his youth he had been a leftist and then a union activist–marching against the war in Vietnam and then a fighter for the CWA in its contract battles.^[5]

The retreat of the labor movement in the telecoms, coupled to privatizations and buyouts hangs over the whole first section of the book–here was someone who had participated in the strikes of the 1980s, shuffled from office to office and lucky enough to remain technically valued even as colleagues and coworkers were devastated by layoffs. Klein presented himself effectively as a cowboy who had hung up his spurs, but still knew what it was to take a stand. Whistleblowers and those who engage in other individually heroic acts do not emerge from nowhere. They come from movements of people, from workforces empowered to fight the bosses and that feel their rights in their guts. As the EFF hustled him between Washington offices on a whirlwind schedule, Klein quipped he needed his steward to demand he get his contractual bathroom break. Klein was maybe in one of the last generations at AT&T who could lay claim to that. If we want more like him, then perhaps we will be served by building up a fighting workforce in the telecoms again.

Another example to be gleaned from Klein’s book is how many doors were shut in his face–how few in the press at first understood or cared about the material he presented them with and, even then, how easily those lone voices could be cowed by an editor in turn cowed by a judicious phone call from a high placed government official. Not only were journalists loath to cover the story at first, risking jeopardizing their access and favor from the government–but also, elected officials and politicians themselves, including many ostensible liberals and progressives in the Democratic Party, revealed that they cared very little about the laws and rights they purported to uphold. When finally the evidence was too incontrovertible to deny, rather than stop the surveillance, they instead sought to legalize it–not to abide by the laws, but bend them further to the power of the executive and the surveillance state.

In that sense Wiring Up is also a story of the limits of going through the “right” channels and doing things the proper way–a tactic that done properly can lead to mass knowledge, but not on its own mass action. Much like Snowden’s later and more scandalous subsequent revelations, the revelation of NSA spying by Klein may have made the news, but it did not, nor could it, bring about the sort of mass organizing and protest to challenge the practice. No doubt, this was in part because while the practices were first instituted under the Bush administration, the time for protest would have been under Obama–and here was an executive the liberals trusted to use such powers “for good.” A leading force in such a movement could–and should–have been the CWA itself, whose members, such as Klein, were press-ganged into “connecting the big brother machine”–but the CWA of the 2000s was far from that of 1983 when over half a million went out on strike to negotiate the last contract with the Bell system.^[6] In fact, as Klein writes, the installation of a NSA secret room in the Bridgeton, Missouri Network Operations Center was accompanied by a union-busting operation that fired all union workers and replaced them under non-union contracts. It is telling that Klein, a lifelong union man, does not describe himself as believing he should go to the CWA for assistance in his campaign or of making any attempt to do so–nor, sadly, can his estimation at the time be faulted.

A further strength of Klien is his detailed examination of the “prehistory” of the unbounded and imperial presidency with a unitary executive which we in the US are particularly confronted with today under the second Trump administration. It was under Bush Jr. and the “war on terror” that a vast erosion in checks on the executive branch was undertaken. But it was the Democratic Party that played a key role in shoring it up–not least in passing the FISA Amendments Act of 2008^[7]–both legalizing the sorts of formerly illegal spying that Klein and others had exposed and also granting retroactive immunity to the companies who had participated in this spying. Klein writes of this and his endeavors to oppose it: “History is marching backwards. The Democratic Party has in effect unwound one of the main reforms of the post-Watergate era and accepted the outrageous criminal rationalizations of Nixon himself,” going on to quote Nixon’s famous line to David Frost: “When the president does it that means it is not illegal.”

The narrative ends on a somber note, describing how Obama out of office had postured against the expansion of executive power, but once in office rolled out new legal arguments, including “sovereign immunity” that extended past even the overreach of the Bush administration. Klein writes: “Obama used his civil liberties cloak to help him get elected, but now feels free to remove it and cater to the intelligence bureaucracy. It was pure political deception.” This strengthening of executive powers of the presidency was always a possibility and even an innate tendency in a constitutional order where the branch was separated from the more democratic and accountable mechanisms of parliamentary rule.^[8] Under Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR its powers have been progressively expanded. But it is really the assertion of unchecked powers under Bush and codified under Obama which has set the stage for Trump’s current rampage. The story Klein tells is of the specific legal cases that paved the way, the outrageous acts that did not occasion a response of mass outrage, and the political forces, Democratic and Republican alike, who ushered them through. Not only have the FISA amendments whose passage Klein fought been consistently reauthorized, but under the Biden administration they were further expanded.^[9] The strengthened powers to spy on foreign nationals added to Section 702 have no doubt been of great service to Trump in his targeting of immigrants for their support to Palestine.

Wiring Up The Big Brother Machine has the quality of a time capsule. Today we are accustomed and inured to the pervasiveness of state surveillance. We expect our phones to be tapped, our emails to be read, and our “private” documents in the cloud to be inspected, and that these things can be done on a whim and a handshake, at most–no warrant necessary. We may expect privacy from fellow citizens, but not the government. Nonetheless, in recent and living memory, these practices were illegal and scandalous. Spying on native soil was considered a forbidden practice of only the most authoritarian states. If we know today about the pervasive collusion of the NSA and private industry, then what more are they still keeping from us? Certainly things must have now gone even further, and in collaboration with private contracting firms like Palantir will go further still. It behooves us to remember that all these practices did not used to be, and need not be – and to not forget those who stood against them, or those who welcomed them in. Klein concludes by recalling the judgement of journalist I.F. Stone that “all governments lie.”^[10] In remembering Klein’s service we should ask the question: what are we going to do about it?

1. Cindy Cohn and Corynne McSherry, “In Memoriam: Mark Klein, AT&T Whistleblower Who Revealed NSA Mass Spying,” EFF, March 12, 2025, www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/memoriam-mark-klein-att-whistleblower-about-nsa-mass-spying.

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2. Keith Olbermann, “The Whistleblower Vs. The Spies,” November 2007, www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaoYbm99lxM.

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3. Mark Klein, Wiring Up The Big Brother Machine… And Fighting It (Booksurge Publishing, 2009), mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/book/9781439229965.

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4. James Risen and Eirc Lichtblau, “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts,” New York Times, December 16, 2005, www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/bush-lets-us-spy-on-callers-without-courts.html.

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5. More of that political history was made public in a recent obituary: “Mark Klein (1945-2025),” Workers Vanguard, No. 1184, 3 April 2025, iclfi.org/pubs/wv/1184/mark-klein.

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6. Lucius Cabins, “The Line You Have Reached... Disconnect It!,” Processed World, No. 9, November 1983, libcom.org/article/line-you-have-reached-disconnect-it.

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7. ACLU, “Why the FISA Amendments Act is Unconstitutional”, February 5, 2008, www.aclu.org/documents/why-fisa-amendments-act-unconstitutional.

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8. Ziyad Motala, “The US Constitution was not made to protect against Trump,” Al Jazeera, February 26, 2025, www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/2/26/the-us-constitution-was-not-made-to-protect-against-trump.

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9. Matthew Guariglia, Andrew Crocker, Cindy Cohn, and Brendan Gilligan, “U.S. Senate and Biden Administration Shamefully Renew and Expand FISA Section 702, Ushering in a Two Year Expansion of Unconstitutional Mass Surveillance,” April 22, 2024, www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/04/us-senate-and-biden-administration-shamefully-renew-and-expand-fisa-section-702-0.

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10. Klein, Wiring Up, 109.

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