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Cliche as it may be to say: Mr. Klein goes to Washington.

Tomorrow the Senate Judiciary Committee will get its hands on the surveillance bill passed by the intelligence committee last month. The bill blesses warrantless surveillance of foreign-domestic communications related to gathering foreign intelligence, but its most infamous provision is the legal immunity it seeks to grant telecommunications companies that complied with the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program from 2001 until this January. Civil libertarians are enraged at the provision, which will invalidate a number of class-action lawsuits against the telecoms currently pending. Now they have a new lobbying ally: Mark Klein.

Klein is the retired AT&T technician who disclosed in late 2005 how his former employer had allowed the NSA to use Room 641A of 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco as a vacuum cleaner to capture untold millions of phone and e-mail communications. (You can read his first-hand account here, in a pdf.) His revelations formed the basis for a lawsuit, Hepting v. AT&T, currently before a federal court. Now he’s trying to convince Senators not to preempt the case, reports The Washington Post.

The plain-spoken, bespectacled Klein, 62, said he may be the only person in the country in a position to discuss firsthand knowledge of an important aspect of the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program. He is retired, so he isn’t worried about losing his job. He did not have security clearance, and the documents in his possession were not classified, he said. He has no qualms about “turning in,” as he put it, the company where he worked for 22 years until he retired in 2004.

“If they’ve done something massively illegal and unconstitutional — well, they should suffer the consequences,” Klein said. “It’s not my place to feel bad for them. They made their bed, they have to lie in it. The ones who did [anything wrong], you can be sure, are high up in the company. Not the average Joes, who I enjoyed working with.”

The Bush administration says granting immunity is a matter of basic fairness. One (occasional) administration dissenter from the surveillance program, ex-AG John Ashcroft, agrees — though Ashcroft now lobbies on behalf of telecoms, so that might, um, inform his perspective.

Klein says that AT&T and its affiliates (and competitors) didn’t just give the NSA domestic-to-overseas communications, and it didn’t just give subscriber information known as “metadata.” It gave them everything:

In an interview yesterday, he alleged that the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T . Contrary to the government’s depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists, Klein said, much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic. Klein said he believes that the NSA was analyzing the records for usage patterns as well as for content. …

One of Klein’s documents listed links to 16 entities, including Global Crossing, a large provider of voice and data services in the United States and abroad; UUNet, a large Internet provider in Northern Virginia now owned by Verizon; Level 3 Communications, which provides local, long-distance and data transmission in the United States and overseas; and more familiar names such as Sprint and Qwest. It also included data exchanges MAE-West and PAIX, or Palo Alto Internet Exchange, facilities where telecom carriers hand off Internet traffic to each other.

“I flipped out,” he said. “They’re copying the whole Internet. There’s no selection going on here. Maybe they select out later, but at the point of handoff to the government, they get everything.”

Tomorrow we’ll see whether the Judiciary Committee, which has been more confrontational over surveillance issues than the intelligence committee has, flips out as well — or whether Klein is in Washington for nothing.

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