US spying threatens civil liberties
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E-mail Xinhua, August 18, 2015
The combined spying capabilities of the U.S. government and some private companies threaten civil liberties, according to a formal employee of AT&T.
On Saturday, The New York Times published a story confirming that U.S. telecom giant AT&T had helped the country's National Security Agency (NSA) spy on vast swaths of Internet traffic.
"This threatens civil liberties, as individuals have little power against such combinations. It's intimidating," former AT&T technician and whistleblower Mark Klein told Russian news agency Sputnik.
According to The New York Times report, the company gave the NSA access, through several ways, to billions of emails flowing across its domestic networks, and all Internet communications at the United Nations headquarters, one of its customers. It also installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its Internet hubs on American soil, far more than its competitor Verizon.
"Incidents happen when people find the government is after them," Klein said, referring to recent reports of U.S. surveillance targeting members of the Occupy Wall Street movement or the Black Lives Matter organization.
He said that the domestic surveillance "happens in times of social struggle when the government wants to crack down."
Klein was a line technician at AT&T's corporate office in San Francisco before retiring in 2004. He documented evidence of the NSA working with AT&T technicians to tap the company's main Internet data stream when he was working there.
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