WEBVTT 00:00:18.640 --> 00:00:25.679 It's room 641A says on the door, and what's mysterious about it is there's no door handle. 00:00:25.679 --> 00:00:28.000 So it looks kinda odd. 00:00:33.119 --> 00:00:38.560 There is a room on the sixth floor of a building on Folsom Street in San Francisco. 00:00:38.560 --> 00:00:42.880 And Mark Klein is not allowed to go in. 00:00:42.880 --> 00:00:46.640 If you know Mark, you know that's strange. 00:00:46.640 --> 00:00:51.679 Because for 22 years, going into rooms like this has been his job. 00:00:51.679 --> 00:01:00.719 Rooms full of routers and modems and the perpetual mechanical whirr of the machines that make our phones work and the internet run. 00:01:00.719 --> 00:01:05.920 Mark has keys to every door in the building except for this one. 00:01:05.920 --> 00:01:12.319 Only one man in the building has the clearance to walk through this door, and it is not him. 00:01:12.319 --> 00:01:18.400 One day the air conditioner inside the room starts to leak. 00:01:18.400 --> 00:01:23.599 Water comes down through the floor onto the equipment below. 00:01:23.599 --> 00:01:28.799 But that one man isn't available to fix it, so the water keeps coming. 00:01:28.799 --> 00:01:30.239 For days. 00:01:30.239 --> 00:01:35.040 Emergency or not, no one else is allowed in. 00:01:35.040 --> 00:01:39.760 Mark Klein wonders what is in that room. 00:01:39.760 --> 00:01:42.560 And he is going to find out. 00:01:42.560 --> 00:01:47.760 Then he is going to spend the rest of his life trying to tell you. 00:01:47.760 --> 00:01:53.120 I'm Daina Bouquin, and this is Found in the Machine. 00:01:53.120 --> 00:02:00.879 From my house in western Massachusetts, I can see the top of Mount Greylock. 00:02:00.879 --> 00:02:07.439 It is the highest point in the state, and there is a stone memorial tower at the summit. 00:02:07.439 --> 00:02:10.479 At night the tower lights up. 00:02:10.479 --> 00:02:14.240 It is very small from where I stand. 00:02:14.240 --> 00:02:18.479 But my five-year-old son can see it from his window too. 00:02:18.479 --> 00:02:24.240 One evening, around dusk, he asked me what the other one was. 00:02:24.240 --> 00:02:26.960 I didn't know what he meant. 00:02:26.960 --> 00:02:28.319 The other what? 00:02:28.319 --> 00:02:31.120 He pointed. 00:02:31.840 --> 00:02:34.080 The one next to it, he said. 00:02:34.080 --> 00:02:37.680 So I turned and I really looked. 00:02:37.680 --> 00:02:47.759 And there, just to the right of the tower that I looked at every single day, was a faint line standing out against the fading sky. 00:02:47.759 --> 00:02:49.680 A radio tower. 00:02:49.680 --> 00:02:52.240 I had simply edited it out. 00:02:52.240 --> 00:02:56.319 And I think we do that with almost all of them. 00:02:56.319 --> 00:03:01.599 Some towers we just stop noticing, and others we hide on purpose. 00:03:01.599 --> 00:03:09.120 We dress them up as ugly pine trees planted along the highways so the thing carrying our voices disappears into the scenery. 00:03:09.120 --> 00:03:13.759 But the towers are only the part that rises above the ground. 00:03:13.759 --> 00:03:17.120 The signals they catch do not stay in the air. 00:03:17.120 --> 00:03:18.800 They dive. 00:03:18.800 --> 00:03:21.360 Straight down into the earth. 00:03:21.360 --> 00:03:32.000 The waves become light pulsing through dark conduits, running beneath the roads, crawling across the cold, crushing black of the ocean floor. 00:03:32.000 --> 00:03:34.159 It is vast. 00:03:34.159 --> 00:03:43.439 It may be the largest machine human beings have ever built, and most of us have trained ourselves not to see any of it. 00:03:43.439 --> 00:03:46.879 We have to be told that it's there. 00:03:46.879 --> 00:03:49.759 Sometimes by a child. 00:03:49.759 --> 00:03:56.400 And anything you have stopped seeing is an easy thing to steal. 00:03:56.400 --> 00:04:04.960 Twenty years ago, in a windowless building with a secret room, Mark Klein found a thief. 00:04:04.960 --> 00:04:08.240 But that's not where he started. 00:04:08.240 --> 00:04:13.360 He went to Cornell in 1962 and enrolled at the School of Engineering. 00:04:13.360 --> 00:04:17.839 But somewhere along the way, Mark put down engineering. 00:04:17.839 --> 00:04:23.920 He graduated in 1966 with a degree not in electronics, but in history. 00:04:23.920 --> 00:04:29.519 A historian is trained to look past the official press release. 00:04:29.519 --> 00:04:32.720 They go looking for the primary source. 00:04:32.720 --> 00:04:36.160 That instinct never left him. 00:04:36.160 --> 00:04:40.480 But the world was hurtling towards a future built on silicon and circuitry. 00:04:40.480 --> 00:04:43.519 So in the end, Mark did go to technical school. 00:04:43.519 --> 00:04:46.000 He learned the machines after all. 00:04:46.000 --> 00:04:50.079 And by 1981, he landed a job at AT&T. 00:04:50.079 --> 00:04:54.720 Now, fast forward to the summer of 2002. 00:04:54.720 --> 00:05:01.839 Mark is sitting at his workstation in an AT&T office on Geary Street in San Francisco. 00:05:01.839 --> 00:05:04.000 An email comes in. 00:05:04.000 --> 00:05:11.759 A representative from the National Security Agency, the NSA, is coming to visit the office. 00:05:11.759 --> 00:05:15.920 Mark happens to be the one who opens the door when the agent arrives. 00:05:15.920 --> 00:05:21.920 A closed-mouthed, unsmiling man who conducts his interviews and leaves. 00:05:21.920 --> 00:05:33.600 Soon after, Mark learns that one of his colleagues has been transferred to a building on Folsom Street to work in a large, newly built room on the sixth floor. 00:05:33.600 --> 00:05:37.040 No one is really sure what the room is for. 00:05:37.040 --> 00:05:47.680 Then at lunch one day, another colleague mentions that rooms just like it are going up in other AT &T buildings in other cities too. 00:05:47.680 --> 00:05:54.000 Now you have to remember what the United States was like around this time. 00:05:54.000 --> 00:05:56.800 So soon after September 11th. 00:05:56.800 --> 00:06:01.360 America was afraid and the government was on high alert. 00:06:01.360 --> 00:06:09.199 Inside the Defense Department, a man named John Poindexter had proposed a system that he said would protect the country. 00:06:09.199 --> 00:06:12.959 The system would just need to see almost everything about everyone. 00:06:12.959 --> 00:06:17.439 He called it Total Information Awareness. 00:06:17.439 --> 00:06:22.160 The idea was to build a dragnet so complete that no threat could hide. 00:06:22.160 --> 00:06:32.240 Financial records, medical files, browsing history, your face, your gait, your veterinary records. 00:06:32.240 --> 00:06:36.240 The program became public and Congress killed it in 2003. 00:06:36.240 --> 00:06:39.680 It was too much and the name was too honest. 00:06:39.680 --> 00:06:44.560 Even a rebrand to Terrorism Information Awareness couldn't save it. 00:06:44.560 --> 00:06:49.120 But killing a program is not the same as killing an idea. 00:06:49.120 --> 00:06:51.600 The architecture survived. 00:06:51.600 --> 00:06:55.199 It just moved deeper into the hands of the NSA. 00:06:55.199 --> 00:07:05.120 This is the world Mark Klein walks into in the fall of 2003 when he is also transferred to AT&T's Folsom Street facility. 00:07:05.120 --> 00:07:12.720 This building is massive, a brutalist fortress with almost no window light. 00:07:12.720 --> 00:07:17.519 It is also a vital organ in the anatomy of the American Internet. 00:07:17.519 --> 00:07:19.759 It's a peering hub. 00:07:19.759 --> 00:07:25.680 A place where AT&T's network physically shakes hands with the networks of other companies. 00:07:25.680 --> 00:07:29.839 It's part of what is referred to as the internet backbone. 00:07:29.839 --> 00:07:43.120 Data from millions of people flows into this building, travels up to the seventh floor, gets sorted by massive routers, and is sent back out into the world to find its destination. 00:07:43.120 --> 00:07:49.759 But Mark soon finds that not all of the data is leaving the building. 00:07:49.759 --> 00:07:59.920 While he is learning the ropes in the cavernous seventh floor internet room, he asks an older coworker about the secret room down on the sixth floor. 00:07:59.920 --> 00:08:02.160 Room 641A. 00:08:02.160 --> 00:08:08.399 Mark assumes it's for listening to phone calls because the phone switch is right next door. 00:08:08.399 --> 00:08:10.879 No, he says. Internet. The coworker shows him a cabinet in the internet room. A splitter cabinet. Here is how a fiber-optic splitter works. A strand of fiber is a pipe full of light. That light is your data. To tap it, you cut open the fiber coming down from the routers. You splice a bit of special glass into that wound to create a fork. When the light hits the fork, it splits. 00:08:10.879 --> 00:08:51.039 It's called fiber tapping, and it is passive. 00:08:51.039 --> 00:08:55.919 It doesn't require electricity or have a computer brain. 00:08:55.919 --> 00:09:01.120 Because it is just a piece of molded glass, it makes a clone of the data silently. 00:09:01.120 --> 00:09:04.000 It doesn't leave a digital footprint. 00:09:04.000 --> 00:09:09.600 One half of the light continues on its normal journey out to the person who it was meant for. 00:09:09.600 --> 00:09:16.799 While the other half, the exact duplicate of every email and search query, is diverted. 00:09:16.799 --> 00:09:22.000 It gets fed down a separate line into room 641A. 00:09:22.000 --> 00:09:27.519 And the illusion of privacy stays intact. 00:09:27.519 --> 00:09:34.960 Time passes, and Mark's unease about the secret room grows. 00:09:34.960 --> 00:09:38.480 But he does his job in the internet room. 00:09:38.480 --> 00:09:45.279 Then one day a coworker hands Mark a set of documents that had been left lying around on top of a router. 00:09:45.279 --> 00:09:51.200 Mark takes them back to his desk, and of course he reads them. 00:09:51.200 --> 00:09:56.159 When he realizes what he is holding, he almost falls out of his chair. 00:09:56.159 --> 00:10:09.440 The documents show that in February 2003, AT &T cut into 16 high-speed internet peering links and installed a device called a Narus STA 6400. 00:10:09.440 --> 00:10:14.639 STA stands for Semantic Traffic Analyzer. 00:10:14.639 --> 00:10:28.399 This machine is built to swallow data at incomprehensible speeds, to sift through noise, capture the light, and read everything, looking for whatever someone programs it to find. 00:10:28.399 --> 00:10:36.960 And there are other rooms in other AT &T buildings across the country, just like 641A. 00:10:36.960 --> 00:10:44.080 If Mark speaks up, he is going to lose his job, lose the pension. 00:10:44.080 --> 00:10:46.480 He might go to federal prison. 00:10:46.480 --> 00:10:52.720 The Espionage Act does not look kindly on people who talk about the National Security Agency. 00:10:52.720 --> 00:10:56.000 But he is sure he can't be the only one who knows. 00:10:56.000 --> 00:11:01.440 In May 2004, Mark Klein retires. 00:11:01.440 --> 00:11:06.639 But when he leaves the building for the last time, he takes the documents with him. 00:11:06.639 --> 00:11:09.919 The historian holds on to the primary sources. 00:11:09.919 --> 00:11:13.279 He takes them home and puts them in a drawer. 00:11:13.279 --> 00:11:15.679 And still he waits. 00:11:15.679 --> 00:11:18.559 Over a year passes. 00:11:18.559 --> 00:11:25.759 Then, in December 2005, the New York Times publishes an explosive Pulitzer-winning story. 00:11:25.759 --> 00:11:33.039 They reveal that the Bush administration has been running a secret, warrantless wiretapping program in the wake of 9-11. 00:11:33.039 --> 00:11:35.440 The secret is finally out. 00:11:35.440 --> 00:11:39.120 But the government pushes back on the story. 00:12:01.360 --> 00:12:10.000 In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on our nation, I authorized the National Security Agency, consistent with US law and the Constitution, to intercept the international communications of people with known [leaks] links to Al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations. Before we intercept these communications, the government must have information that establishes a clear link to these terrorist networks. 00:12:10.000 --> 00:12:16.639 This is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security. 00:12:19.039 --> 00:12:21.039 Mark knows this is a lie. 00:12:21.039 --> 00:12:24.240 The thing he saw, it doesn't listen to specific people. 00:12:24.240 --> 00:12:26.799 It splits the light. 00:12:26.799 --> 00:12:29.919 And he realizes something else. 00:12:29.919 --> 00:12:37.679 Anyone who knows the truth at AT&T is still employed there, and he may be the only one who knows and is free. 00:12:37.679 --> 00:12:45.519 So in early 2006, Mark makes the decision that will reshape the rest of his life. 00:12:45.519 --> 00:12:47.759 He stops waiting. 00:12:47.759 --> 00:13:00.000 Mark puts on a trench coat, gathers his schematics, and walks into the offices of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group in San Francisco's mission district. 00:13:00.000 --> 00:13:03.039 Mark sits down with their lawyers. 00:13:03.039 --> 00:13:06.399 He tells them about Room 641A. 00:13:06.399 --> 00:13:11.519 He explains the splitter cabinet and signs a sworn declaration. 00:13:11.519 --> 00:13:18.320 The EFF uses Mark's evidence to file a sweeping class action lawsuit, Hepting v. 00:13:18.320 --> 00:13:19.440 AT&T. 00:13:19.440 --> 00:13:23.840 For one bright moment, it looks like the machine might come apart. 00:13:23.840 --> 00:13:26.480 But then the government does two things. 00:13:26.480 --> 00:13:33.039 First, it told the court that the case could not go forward because everything about it was a state secret. 00:13:33.039 --> 00:13:37.440 The court disagrees, but in the end it doesn't matter. 00:13:37.440 --> 00:13:41.600 Because Congress reaches back and rewrites the past. 00:13:41.600 --> 00:13:50.159 In 2008, they pass a law that makes every company that opened its wires to the government untouchable. 00:13:50.159 --> 00:13:56.000 You could no longer sue them because as of that morning they had never broken the law. 00:13:56.000 --> 00:14:01.200 That same statute made the machine itself legal going forward. 00:14:01.200 --> 00:14:04.399 So the case against AT&T is dismissed. 00:14:04.399 --> 00:14:09.679 Not because Mark was wrong, but because Congress changed the rules. 00:14:09.679 --> 00:14:15.840 The lawyers tried again with a new suit, but the court said Mark's evidence wasn't enough. 00:14:15.840 --> 00:14:25.200 They said although he could describe the machine, because he did not work in the room, he could not speak to what was happening on the other side of the door. 00:14:25.200 --> 00:14:28.799 The door he could not open. 00:14:28.799 --> 00:14:33.200 Mark Klein lived another 20 years. 00:14:33.200 --> 00:14:35.039 He wrote a book. 00:14:35.039 --> 00:14:37.120 He gave interviews. 00:14:37.120 --> 00:14:39.039 Then he got sick. 00:14:39.039 --> 00:14:43.600 And in March 2025, he passed away at 79. 00:14:43.600 --> 00:14:49.200 His documents remain a cornerstone for privacy activists and lawyers. 00:14:49.200 --> 00:14:52.399 But the machine he found never turned off. 00:14:52.399 --> 00:14:56.080 The statute that lets the U.S. 00:14:56.080 --> 00:15:02.720 government pull data from the Internet backbone without warrants is FISA Section 702. 00:15:02.720 --> 00:15:09.200 Congress actually let it expire in June 2026, but the machine didn't even slow down. 00:15:09.200 --> 00:15:14.559 A secret court called the FISA court had already signed off in another year. 00:15:14.559 --> 00:15:30.720 You cannot write a spy thriller about a work order to install a splitter cabinet. 00:15:30.720 --> 00:15:33.440 But that's what Mark had. 00:15:33.440 --> 00:15:40.240 A quiet technician showed up with some schematics, and it didn't look like Watergate. 00:15:40.240 --> 00:15:42.799 It looked like math and glass. 00:15:42.799 --> 00:15:48.879 And we don't feel it when they take half the light. 00:15:48.879 --> 00:15:52.080 We don't even notice the light. 00:15:52.080 --> 00:15:58.639 We edit out the towers on the horizon, and our words run unfelt beneath our feet. 00:15:58.639 --> 00:16:03.679 The room is still there and the door is still locked. 00:16:03.679 --> 00:16:07.200 Yet, we feel fine. I'm Daina Bouquin, and this is Found in the Machine. If you would like to hear more from me and find out what didn't make it into this episode, you can go to notes.foundinthemachine.com. Thanks for listening.