Anybody with a security clearance, they said, who reveals this information will be prosecuted and that's when I realized I was in something of a unique position because I was able to expose some of it without breaking any security rules because I didn't have a security cleareance.
One day the site manager told us we would be getting a visit from an agent of the National Security Agency. From the NSA, he was very explicit.
It was strange to me that the NSA would be in an AT&T office to begin with since it was my understanding that going back to the 70s that the NSA does foreign interception, not domestic.
The entry [to the secret room] was highly restricted. In order to get into that room you needed not only to have an ordinary key, you needed to know the code to punch into the keypad on the door and the only person who had both of those things was one guy who was cleared by the NSA. [However Klein saw documents outside the room.] So I picked them up and looked at them and then I almost fell out my chair because after I had studied them for a bit I realized what they had done.
And the purpose [of the room] was to make copies of all the internet traffic going through the fiber optic cables, all of it,. This is domestic as well as international traffic. All of it that went through the splitter was copied and sent to the secret room.
They are vacumming everything going across those links, I'm certain of it. That's the physical arrangement; there's no dispute about it, I looked at the cables, I traced the cables. I know where they went. The documents show where they went; they go to the secret room.
I was watching [President Bush's December 2005 press conference about the wiretapping program] and I was getting angrier and angrier - so most people hearing that would think 'I don't make calls to Al Qaeda so that doesn't affect me.' That's what they wanted you to think. They tried to make you think it was about phone calls, but a lot of it is also about the internet and about gobs and gobs of information going across the internet and that affects everybody. And that's the part they haven't let out, and that's the part I decided had to be uncovered.
[A top L.A. Times reporter] worked on it for weeks "It's going to be big story - this is going to be big" and then suddenly he told me on the phone 'It's delayed while our top guy at the L.A. Times is going to have a meeting about this with the then director of national intelligence John Negroponte,' and I then thought 'This does not sound like good news.' To make a long story short, after this meeting with the government, the story was killed."
[Responding to interviewer question, Do you think you are helping terrorists by revealing this operation?]
No, I think I am helping defend the Constitution of the United States. The only people being kept in the dark are the American people who are being misled and are not realizing and not being told that their liberties are being destroyed, trampled upon.
