Mark Klein (archival audio): It's room 641A says on the door, and what's mysterious about it is there's no door handle.
Mark Klein (archival audio): So it looks kinda odd.
Daina Bouquin: There is a room on the sixth floor of a building on Folsom Street in San Francisco.
Daina Bouquin: And Mark Klein is not allowed to go in.
Daina Bouquin: If you know Mark, you know that's strange.
Daina Bouquin: Because for 22 years, going into rooms like this has been his job.
Daina Bouquin: Rooms full of routers and modems and the perpetual mechanical whirr of the machines that make our phones work and the internet run.
Daina Bouquin: Mark has keys to every door in the building except for this one.
Daina Bouquin: Only one man in the building has the clearance to walk through this door, and it is not him.
Daina Bouquin: One day the air conditioner inside the room starts to leak.
Daina Bouquin: Water comes down through the floor onto the equipment below.
Daina Bouquin: But that one man isn't available to fix it, so the water keeps coming.
Daina Bouquin: For days.
Daina Bouquin: Emergency or not, no one else is allowed in.
Daina Bouquin: Mark Klein wonders what is in that room.
Daina Bouquin: And he is going to find out.
Daina Bouquin: Then he is going to spend the rest of his life trying to tell you.
Daina Bouquin: I'm Daina Bouquin, and this is Found in the Machine.
Daina Bouquin: From my house in western Massachusetts, I can see the top of Mount Greylock.
Daina Bouquin: It is the highest point in the state, and there is a stone memorial tower at the summit.
Daina Bouquin: At night the tower lights up.
Daina Bouquin: It is very small from where I stand.
Daina Bouquin: But my five-year-old son can see it from his window too.
Daina Bouquin: One evening, around dusk, he asked me what the other one was.
Daina Bouquin: I didn't know what he meant.
Daina Bouquin: The other what?
Daina Bouquin: He pointed.
Daina Bouquin: The one next to it, he said.
Daina Bouquin: So I turned and I really looked.
Daina Bouquin: 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.
Daina Bouquin: A radio tower.
Daina Bouquin: I had simply edited it out.
Daina Bouquin: And I think we do that with almost all of them.
Daina Bouquin: Some towers we just stop noticing, and others we hide on purpose.
Daina Bouquin: We dress them up as ugly pine trees planted along the highways so the thing carrying our voices disappears into the scenery.
Daina Bouquin: But the towers are only the part that rises above the ground.
Daina Bouquin: The signals they catch do not stay in the air.
Daina Bouquin: They dive.
Daina Bouquin: Straight down into the earth.
Daina Bouquin: The waves become light pulsing through dark conduits, running beneath the roads, crawling across the cold, crushing black of the ocean floor.
Daina Bouquin: It is vast.
Daina Bouquin: It may be the largest machine human beings have ever built, and most of us have trained ourselves not to see any of it.
Daina Bouquin: We have to be told that it's there.
Daina Bouquin: Sometimes by a child.
Daina Bouquin: And anything you have stopped seeing is an easy thing to steal.
Daina Bouquin: Twenty years ago, in a windowless building with a secret room, Mark Klein found a thief.
Daina Bouquin: But that's not where he started.
Daina Bouquin: He went to Cornell in 1962 and enrolled at the School of Engineering.
Daina Bouquin: But somewhere along the way, Mark put down engineering.
Daina Bouquin: He graduated in 1966 with a degree not in electronics, but in history.
Daina Bouquin: A historian is trained to look past the official press release.
Daina Bouquin: They go looking for the primary source.
Daina Bouquin: That instinct never left him.
Daina Bouquin: But the world was hurtling towards a future built on silicon and circuitry.
Daina Bouquin: So in the end, Mark did go to technical school.
Daina Bouquin: He learned the machines after all.
Daina Bouquin: And by 1981, he landed a job at AT&T.
Daina Bouquin: Now, fast forward to the summer of 2002.
Daina Bouquin: Mark is sitting at his workstation in an AT&T office on Geary Street in San Francisco.
Daina Bouquin: An email comes in.
Daina Bouquin: A representative from the National Security Agency, the NSA, is coming to visit the office.
Daina Bouquin: Mark happens to be the one who opens the door when the agent arrives.
Daina Bouquin: A closed-mouthed, unsmiling man who conducts his interviews and leaves.
Daina Bouquin: 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.
Daina Bouquin: No one is really sure what the room is for.
Daina Bouquin: 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.
Daina Bouquin: Now you have to remember what the United States was like around this time.
Daina Bouquin: So soon after September 11th.
Daina Bouquin: America was afraid and the government was on high alert.
Daina Bouquin: Inside the Defense Department, a man named John Poindexter had proposed a system that he said would protect the country.
Daina Bouquin: The system would just need to see almost everything about everyone.
Daina Bouquin: He called it Total Information Awareness.
Daina Bouquin: The idea was to build a dragnet so complete that no threat could hide.
Daina Bouquin: Financial records, medical files, browsing history, your face, your gait, your veterinary records.
Daina Bouquin: The program became public and Congress killed it in 2003.
Daina Bouquin: It was too much and the name was too honest.
Daina Bouquin: Even a rebrand to Terrorism Information Awareness couldn't save it.
Daina Bouquin: But killing a program is not the same as killing an idea.
Daina Bouquin: The architecture survived.
Daina Bouquin: It just moved deeper into the hands of the NSA.
Daina Bouquin: 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.
Daina Bouquin: This building is massive, a brutalist fortress with almost no window light.
Daina Bouquin: It is also a vital organ in the anatomy of the American Internet.
Daina Bouquin: It's a peering hub.
Daina Bouquin: A place where AT&T's network physically shakes hands with the networks of other companies.
Daina Bouquin: It's part of what is referred to as the internet backbone.
Daina Bouquin: 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.
Daina Bouquin: But Mark soon finds that not all of the data is leaving the building.
Daina Bouquin: 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.
Daina Bouquin: Room 641A.
Daina Bouquin: Mark assumes it's for listening to phone calls because the phone switch is right next door.
Daina Bouquin: 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.
Daina Bouquin: It's called fiber tapping, and it is passive.
Daina Bouquin: It doesn't require electricity or have a computer brain.
Daina Bouquin: Because it is just a piece of molded glass, it makes a clone of the data silently.
Daina Bouquin: It doesn't leave a digital footprint.
Daina Bouquin: One half of the light continues on its normal journey out to the person who it was meant for.
Daina Bouquin: While the other half, the exact duplicate of every email and search query, is diverted.
Daina Bouquin: It gets fed down a separate line into room 641A.
Daina Bouquin: And the illusion of privacy stays intact.
Daina Bouquin: Time passes, and Mark's unease about the secret room grows.
Daina Bouquin: But he does his job in the internet room.
Daina Bouquin: Then one day a coworker hands Mark a set of documents that had been left lying around on top of a router.
Daina Bouquin: Mark takes them back to his desk, and of course he reads them.
Daina Bouquin: When he realizes what he is holding, he almost falls out of his chair.
Daina Bouquin: 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.
Daina Bouquin: STA stands for Semantic Traffic Analyzer.
Daina Bouquin: 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.
Daina Bouquin: And there are other rooms in other AT &T buildings across the country, just like 641A.
Daina Bouquin: If Mark speaks up, he is going to lose his job, lose the pension.
Daina Bouquin: He might go to federal prison.
Daina Bouquin: The Espionage Act does not look kindly on people who talk about the National Security Agency.
Daina Bouquin: But he is sure he can't be the only one who knows.
Daina Bouquin: In May 2004, Mark Klein retires.
Daina Bouquin: But when he leaves the building for the last time, he takes the documents with him.
Daina Bouquin: The historian holds on to the primary sources.
Daina Bouquin: He takes them home and puts them in a drawer.
Daina Bouquin: And still he waits.
Daina Bouquin: Over a year passes.
Daina Bouquin: Then, in December 2005, the New York Times publishes an explosive Pulitzer-winning story.
Daina Bouquin: They reveal that the Bush administration has been running a secret, warrantless wiretapping program in the wake of 9-11.
Daina Bouquin: The secret is finally out.
Daina Bouquin: But the government pushes back on the story.
George W. Bush (archival audio): 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.
George W. Bush (archival audio): This is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security.
Daina Bouquin: Mark knows this is a lie.
Daina Bouquin: The thing he saw, it doesn't listen to specific people.
Daina Bouquin: It splits the light.
Daina Bouquin: And he realizes something else.
Daina Bouquin: Anyone who knows the truth at AT&T is still employed there, and he may be the only one who knows and is free.
Daina Bouquin: So in early 2006, Mark makes the decision that will reshape the rest of his life.
Daina Bouquin: He stops waiting.
Daina Bouquin: 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.
Daina Bouquin: Mark sits down with their lawyers.
Daina Bouquin: He tells them about Room 641A.
Daina Bouquin: He explains the splitter cabinet and signs a sworn declaration.
Daina Bouquin: The EFF uses Mark's evidence to file a sweeping class action lawsuit, Hepting v.
Daina Bouquin: AT&T.
Daina Bouquin: For one bright moment, it looks like the machine might come apart.
Daina Bouquin: But then the government does two things.
Daina Bouquin: First, it told the court that the case could not go forward because everything about it was a state secret.
Daina Bouquin: The court disagrees, but in the end it doesn't matter.
Daina Bouquin: Because Congress reaches back and rewrites the past.
Daina Bouquin: In 2008, they pass a law that makes every company that opened its wires to the government untouchable.
Daina Bouquin: You could no longer sue them because as of that morning they had never broken the law.
Daina Bouquin: That same statute made the machine itself legal going forward.
Daina Bouquin: So the case against AT&T is dismissed.
Daina Bouquin: Not because Mark was wrong, but because Congress changed the rules.
Daina Bouquin: The lawyers tried again with a new suit, but the court said Mark's evidence wasn't enough.
Daina Bouquin: 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.
Daina Bouquin: The door he could not open.
Daina Bouquin: Mark Klein lived another 20 years.
Daina Bouquin: He wrote a book.
Daina Bouquin: He gave interviews.
Daina Bouquin: Then he got sick.
Daina Bouquin: And in March 2025, he passed away at 79.
Daina Bouquin: His documents remain a cornerstone for privacy activists and lawyers.
Daina Bouquin: But the machine he found never turned off.
Daina Bouquin: The statute that lets the U.S.
Daina Bouquin: government pull data from the Internet backbone without warrants is FISA Section 702.
Daina Bouquin: Congress actually let it expire in June 2026, but the machine didn't even slow down.
Daina Bouquin: A secret court called the FISA court had already signed off in another year.
Daina Bouquin: You cannot write a spy thriller about a work order to install a splitter cabinet.
Daina Bouquin: But that's what Mark had.
Daina Bouquin: A quiet technician showed up with some schematics, and it didn't look like Watergate.
Daina Bouquin: It looked like math and glass.
Daina Bouquin: And we don't feel it when they take half the light.
Daina Bouquin: We don't even notice the light.
Daina Bouquin: We edit out the towers on the horizon, and our words run unfelt beneath our feet.
Daina Bouquin: The room is still there and the door is still locked.
Daina Bouquin: 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.