Nooooooo! He was my next door neighbor a few years ago, and I knew him as a person before I realized that I knew him as a hero.
His dogs were fiercely protective of his house, which is perfectly understandable. One day I saw a "sewer cleaning" van behind his house, and I have a hard time believing that's what it really was: https://honeypot.net/2025/03/12/rip-mark-klein.html
That certainly is just a Sewer TV inspection van! I have a hand in writing some of the software that is run on these and processes the videos that come out of them. They all have rack mounted PCs and a monitor with a joystick to control the crawler that goes in the pipe.
> That certainly is just a Sewer TV inspection van!
Hee hee, I can hear the NSA now: "Dammit, who parked a sewer inspection van in the middle of our massive surveillance network?!?"
Back on the topic of indiscriminate wide-net surveillance (which I think was also the focus of the AT&T whistleblower), I quote Bruce Schneier on the Snowden leaks:
"I started this talk by naming three different programs that collect Google user data. Those programs work under different technical capabilities, different corporate alliances, and different legal authorities. You should expect the same thing to be true for cell phone data, for internet data, for everything else. When you have the budget of the NSA and you're given the choice, 'Should you do it this way or that way?' The correct answer is: both."
I mean, if a sufficiently capable entity is interested in snooping on an individual like this, mimicking a sewer tv inspection van is a trivial endeavour. You don’t know at all what that van was doing.
That's almost definitely just a sewer inspection van; I found videos that company has of "multi-sensor pipeline inspections" with the same van, open, with the same equipment visible, and a bunch of people following a bunch of equipment down into a manhole.
As an aside, if you are purchasing an older home make sure you pay for a sewer line inspection. I had no idea this was a thing until a few years later when I had to replace mine and it cost ~$25,000.
I found a video with an identical National Plant Services sewer inspection van, inspecting a large-diameter sewer line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVXceJ3Yxnw
(The photo shows van TV-230 while the video shows van TV-217, so they are different instances of the van.)
That is a van built by Ares (I might have the spelling slightly wrong).
Funny enough I once bought a used one, stripped the sewer inspection equipment out, kept the Oman diesel generator and made it into an actual surveillance van.
The inspection robots that came with it were cool. I sold them and the other equipment I pulled out for a good chunk of cash.
The money shot! I did not realize sewer cleaning required so much onsite IT. Are those rack units running computational fluid dynamics models to figure out how to unclog elaborate networks of pipes?
This is crazy.. you guys are focused on vans and mini stories when all his sacrifice and that of thousand if not more americans was snuffed.
`Congress intervened by passing the FISA Amendments Act which, in part, granted “retroactive immunity” to the telecommunications carriers for their involvement in the NSA spying programs. This massive grant of immunity for past violations of multiple state and federal laws protecting communications privacy was unprecedented.`
Be the change you want to see. I mentioned the vans and his dogs because Mark wasn't some random picture on the Internet, but the nice guy a couple houses down who talked about the volunteer work he did for harbor seals[0]. He was a real person we liked a lot and I thought others might enjoy hearing about his noisy, overprotective golden retrievers.
But yes, he was also a personal hero to me before I met him in real life, and we should absolutely still be talking about the things he uncovered and what happened to them afterward. Please do tell those stories, too.
He risked everything, and in the end, the system closed ranks to protect itself. Retroactive immunity was basically a way of saying - "Yep, it was illegal, but it doesn't matter."
You have to remember that half, possibly more than half, of the country is more than okay with what the NSA was doing and is doing.
It's not at all surprising that Congress would indemnify people for, more or less, doing what Congress authorized them to do. If we don't like it, we could consider, maybe not voting the same people into that Congress. Over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over.
A full 24 Senators and 63 Representatives have held their seats for over 36 years. That's not what you'd expect of a citizenship that was actually upset about being spied upon by their government.
> While we were able to use his evidence to make some change, both EFF and Mark were ultimately let down by Congress and the Courts, which have refused to take the steps necessary to end the mass spying even after Edward Snowden provided even more evidence of it in 2013.
Do you have to be a cynic to pretty much have expected this?
It's also hard to make the case that it isn't, ultimately, what the people want, by "the standard you walk past is the standard you accept" principle.
It's been nearly twenty years. If Americans were deeply, deeply bothered by the government spying on them, they'd have burned down this government by now. At most charitable, this speaks to a deep ignorance or apathy in the American electorate and American citizenship. Or a general anxiety about what "the other people" are doing that exceeds their anxiety about what the government can do with panopticon surveillance.
I think, in general, hackers vastly overestimate the average human concern or sensitivity to this kind of thing.
How close are we to “bypassing” a lot of this spying when some of the most popular communications platforms (e.g. WhatsApp) are end to end encrypted? Will the tech eventually solve the problem in a convenient way, at least for those who care?
They have a nicely implemented E2E protocol. This is operationally convenient: Meta can accurately say that they don't store WhatsApp messages, so fewer access requests go to them. And I'm sure it's nice for engineer morale, too.
However, the app makes it semi-mandatory to turn on backups. If you say no, it keeps nagging you. If you always say no, you are in the 0.1% and everyone you talk to has backups enabled, so all of your conversations are helpfully backed up anyway, just not for you :)
These backups go to Google Drive or iCloud. You can draw your own conclusions about who has access and who handles the LE/IC requests.
No, you're not a cynic. The EFF takes exquisite pains to hide from you the fact that these programs spied on foreigners, which is the job of the NSA. Thus, they are necessary and proper, and perfectly legal.
The EFF is a propaganda platform. You shouldn't take its claims at face value.
Don't give us this "perfectly legal" crap. To remind you: the NSA killed off ThinThread (that explicitly took care to avoid wiretapping US citizens' data) in favour of Trailblazer, which grabs ALL data, ALL the time, including ALL US citizens' data.
Their explicit intent was to break the law. They broke the law. Then Congress retroactively let them get away with it. They're still breaking the law today.
> The "change in priority" consisted of the decision made by the director of NSA General Michael V. Hayden to go with a concept called Trailblazer, despite the fact that ThinThread was a working prototype that claimed to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens. ThinThread was dismissed and replaced by the Trailblazer Project, which lacked the privacy protections
Let’s not confuse the fact that they are only legally allowed to spy on foreigners, with what they actually do.
I have no idea how you effectively filter mass wiretaps in fibre raw data and exclude americans. It’s impossible to not catch some/lots of domestic data as well..
So what you're saying is that the NSA wiretapping is OK because they're not doing it to you? That's really dumb.
Currently, the US is in a number of intelligence sharing arrangements in which countries ask other countries to spy on their own citizens for them. e.g. if the NSA can't spy on someone because they know they're American, they ask GCHQ to do it for them. And vice versa. This is why human rights need to be as universal as possible, because otherwise you just ask your buddy to do what you can't legally do yourself.
"We only spy on foreigners" is a water sandwich.
Furthermore, it is NSA policy to treat all encrypted traffic as foreign, and to archive it forever until it can be decrypted and searched to determine if it was legal to decrypt and search it. In other words, "we only spy on foreigners" is a guilty until proven innocent policy.
"Necessary and proper" is decided by a security apparatus with a conflict of interest. Nobody voted for this, the executive branch just decided to do it. As for legality, well, I'll give you that Congress retroactively made the spying legal. On the other hand, the US Constitution has a pretty clear restriction on the use of state power in order to search and seize. Being a foreigner is not in and of itself necessary suspicion to justify searching through all their shit, because being from another country is not a crime.
Had the privilege of watching him receive an award from EFF years ago at ETech. Gave a brief speech. Struck me as a gentle man who really did what he thought was right and for no other purpose. It took moral strength to do what he did. I hope he rests easy.
I don't know if this started the whole movement or whatever you'd call it for this push towards privacy and the general public knowing about it, but it helped a lot. Before him releasing info about room 641A and whatever else, there really wasn't definitive evidence of any government spying and tampering, and either with the intention of starting this movement or simply letting people know, he was a big push in the right direction.
I wonder what percent of Americans would trade their privacy to bring their monthly cell phone bill from $100/mo to $0/mo in exchange for sharing texts and emails with a telecom company.
I suspect the percentage would be surprisingly high.
Unfortunately normal people don’t really care that much about privacy (even if we all think everyone should).
It's also interesting to float the thought experiment of what Gen Z would say about this question because the online norms are so different.
"Hey, sometimes people try to send bombs through the mail. Would you be okay with the government opening 1% of packages, inspecting them, and re-sealing them to make sure they're safe?
... what if they threw in a coupon so the next package mailed is free?"
(... and suddenly I've discovered of my own psyche that if those "The TSA inspected this bag" slips included a coupon for a free coffee, the visceral response to their presence would do a 180. "Oh, sweet! Free coffee!").
not only was there not "definitive evidence"; if you said that the companies did that sort of thing you were called a conspiracy theorist whackaloon. oddly 85% of the general public suddenly was like "well of course they spy on email" after all this came out.
That's not the general sentiment I recall. There was a general sense of 'the government's probably watching' (along with who knows who else: early internet protocols like email really aren't resistant to snooping by more or less anyone), just no public info on specifically how (and you might get some disapproving looks if you claimed any specific approach without evidence).
I'm sure it depended on the audience, but I and others [0] guessed at broad electronic surveillance well before the 641A revelations. I was never called a conspiracy theorist for it either. In the 1990s if you had read Bamford's The Puzzle Palace [1] (published in 1982) and observed the government's legal fight against Zimmermann's PGP encryption software [2], you could make an educated guess close to the truth. If you phrased it as "I'm sure that the government is spying on everything," that went beyond the realm of what could be proved then, but airing suspicions about broad government snooping never elicited strong denials in my experience.
[0] Like the people on the Cypherpunks mailing list
That's a really charitable way of framing the fact that a 15% minority screeching about "the government would never" and "but there's no proof" was able to control the narrative despite people generally having doubt or believing otherwise privately right up until the point that the proof was public record and so ironclad that even mainstream media had to report on it.
(I assume the 85% number is made up, but for whatever the number is the point stands)
The really odd thing is that 85% of the general public will say "well of course they spy on email" even today, after Snowden's leaks showed that the Obama administration had shut that down.
We could do it. We could fundraise to cast a bronze of him and put it anywhere we like. It wouldn't take that many people or that much time, in the grand scheme of things.
Actually, the world might be a nicer place with more statues and less goofy abstract modernist art in public for even more money than bronzes.
He revealed unlawful surveillance years prior to and of the same gravity as Snowden, but only one became a celebrity. I would love to know the reason for that.
I say this without intending to denigrate Snowden at all: Klein's situation was less messy. Snowden had a top secret clearance and vowed to safeguard all the secrets he came across. Klein was just a regular guy doing regular work for a regular company when he saw something strange. That doesn't mean I think Snowden was wrong, just that there's a ton of room for people to say "I agree with him but he shouldn't have done that because he swore not to". Klein didn't have those obligations.
Snowden explained it well. There were four other whistleblowers besides Snowden and Klein.
(1) Russ Tice: USAF intelligence analyst
(2) William Binney: NSA Technical Director.
(3) Thomas Tamm: DOJ lawyer
(4) Thomas A. Drake: senior executive at NSA
Each of them was a senior position relative to Snowden and Klein and all these cases were shut down. What change Snowden had to do traditionally by the book whistleblow or tiny traditional leak. He made the conscious decision to take the information so that they could not shut him down, and make a scene from outside the US (Hong Kong) so that there would be time to talk to the press.
Snowden made a political crime that was morally justified. It was not self serving. It turns out that Americans don't care but at least he made a splash.
Snowden also swore an oath to uphold the constitution, including the fourth amendment that the NSA was illegally violating (one NSA crime) and covering up (second NSA crime), including by lying to congress (third NSA crime), as well as to protect America from domestic enemies, like the kind of traitors who'd come up with a secret plan to violate the constitutional rights of the entire country and lie about it to congress.
Thank goodness he took his oath more seriously than the "I was just following orders" crowd. We know from WW2 that "I was just following orders" is not a legitimate excuse to help facilitate grave atrocities, like all of those other NSA employees did every single day, in violation of their own oaths that they each swore.
I’m watching Person of Interest for the first time. It’s interesting watching it today now that the premise, minus 100% accurate crime prediction, is largely a forgone conclusion. It was produced after Klein but before Snowden and does a good job exploring the expansion of surveillance and just how motivated the government is to have a system that tracks everyone. Of course it’s fiction but it’s a fun watch that asks a lot of good questions.
I really enjoyed that show. Such a shame it was cancelled! Despite critical acclaim (in later seasons, at least), it apparently wasn't profitable enough.
I actually tried to find a legal way to rewatch it the other day, but all of my current subscriptions list it with "rights expired" or some such.
I enjoyed that show enough that I was willing to put up with Amazon's "Freevee" ads because they would not just let me buy the show. I've never done that with any other shows.
Readit News
His dogs were fiercely protective of his house, which is perfectly understandable. One day I saw a "sewer cleaning" van behind his house, and I have a hard time believing that's what it really was: https://honeypot.net/2025/03/12/rip-mark-klein.html
Hee hee, I can hear the NSA now: "Dammit, who parked a sewer inspection van in the middle of our massive surveillance network?!?"
Back on the topic of indiscriminate wide-net surveillance (which I think was also the focus of the AT&T whistleblower), I quote Bruce Schneier on the Snowden leaks:
"I started this talk by naming three different programs that collect Google user data. Those programs work under different technical capabilities, different corporate alliances, and different legal authorities. You should expect the same thing to be true for cell phone data, for internet data, for everything else. When you have the budget of the NSA and you're given the choice, 'Should you do it this way or that way?' The correct answer is: both."
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iMFPMqboZc
Why's the visible person holding the headphones tighter against his ear? What kind of sounds need to be processed by a human for sewer inspection?
To their benefit, if it was sus, they would have kept the door shut.
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> Block Reason: Access from your area has been temporarily limited for security reasons.
My area is Australia.
https://caryloncorp.com/find-a-company/
Funny enough I once bought a used one, stripped the sewer inspection equipment out, kept the Oman diesel generator and made it into an actual surveillance van.
The inspection robots that came with it were cool. I sold them and the other equipment I pulled out for a good chunk of cash.
https://specializedmaintenance.com/services/digital-tv-inspe...
(Which would make it an excellent van for the 3-letter spooks to copy, so not really persuasive either way)
I'd like to believe that, but I don't.
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A) I would question why they would do the effort of still doing surveillance on him
B) if they do, they are usually so smart to keep the door closed
C) like others have mentioned, sewer cleaning comes with a lot of tech (I assume remote controlled machines)
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`Congress intervened by passing the FISA Amendments Act which, in part, granted “retroactive immunity” to the telecommunications carriers for their involvement in the NSA spying programs. This massive grant of immunity for past violations of multiple state and federal laws protecting communications privacy was unprecedented.`
But yes, he was also a personal hero to me before I met him in real life, and we should absolutely still be talking about the things he uncovered and what happened to them afterward. Please do tell those stories, too.
[0]https://goldengatebirdalliance.org/blog-posts/wild-ly-succes...
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Reminds me of George Carlins words, “ It’s never gonna get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got.”
It's not at all surprising that Congress would indemnify people for, more or less, doing what Congress authorized them to do. If we don't like it, we could consider, maybe not voting the same people into that Congress. Over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over.
A full 24 Senators and 63 Representatives have held their seats for over 36 years. That's not what you'd expect of a citizenship that was actually upset about being spied upon by their government.
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> While we were able to use his evidence to make some change, both EFF and Mark were ultimately let down by Congress and the Courts, which have refused to take the steps necessary to end the mass spying even after Edward Snowden provided even more evidence of it in 2013.
Do you have to be a cynic to pretty much have expected this?
It's been nearly twenty years. If Americans were deeply, deeply bothered by the government spying on them, they'd have burned down this government by now. At most charitable, this speaks to a deep ignorance or apathy in the American electorate and American citizenship. Or a general anxiety about what "the other people" are doing that exceeds their anxiety about what the government can do with panopticon surveillance.
I think, in general, hackers vastly overestimate the average human concern or sensitivity to this kind of thing.
They have a nicely implemented E2E protocol. This is operationally convenient: Meta can accurately say that they don't store WhatsApp messages, so fewer access requests go to them. And I'm sure it's nice for engineer morale, too.
However, the app makes it semi-mandatory to turn on backups. If you say no, it keeps nagging you. If you always say no, you are in the 0.1% and everyone you talk to has backups enabled, so all of your conversations are helpfully backed up anyway, just not for you :)
These backups go to Google Drive or iCloud. You can draw your own conclusions about who has access and who handles the LE/IC requests.
We cannot solve political problems by ignoring them and retreating into code.
Dead Comment
The EFF is a propaganda platform. You shouldn't take its claims at face value.
Their explicit intent was to break the law. They broke the law. Then Congress retroactively let them get away with it. They're still breaking the law today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread
> The "change in priority" consisted of the decision made by the director of NSA General Michael V. Hayden to go with a concept called Trailblazer, despite the fact that ThinThread was a working prototype that claimed to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens. ThinThread was dismissed and replaced by the Trailblazer Project, which lacked the privacy protections
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/uk/nsa-staff-used-spy-...
I have no idea how you effectively filter mass wiretaps in fibre raw data and exclude americans. It’s impossible to not catch some/lots of domestic data as well..
Currently, the US is in a number of intelligence sharing arrangements in which countries ask other countries to spy on their own citizens for them. e.g. if the NSA can't spy on someone because they know they're American, they ask GCHQ to do it for them. And vice versa. This is why human rights need to be as universal as possible, because otherwise you just ask your buddy to do what you can't legally do yourself.
"We only spy on foreigners" is a water sandwich.
Furthermore, it is NSA policy to treat all encrypted traffic as foreign, and to archive it forever until it can be decrypted and searched to determine if it was legal to decrypt and search it. In other words, "we only spy on foreigners" is a guilty until proven innocent policy.
"Necessary and proper" is decided by a security apparatus with a conflict of interest. Nobody voted for this, the executive branch just decided to do it. As for legality, well, I'll give you that Congress retroactively made the spying legal. On the other hand, the US Constitution has a pretty clear restriction on the use of state power in order to search and seize. Being a foreigner is not in and of itself necessary suspicion to justify searching through all their shit, because being from another country is not a crime.
Dead Comment
I don't know if this started the whole movement or whatever you'd call it for this push towards privacy and the general public knowing about it, but it helped a lot. Before him releasing info about room 641A and whatever else, there really wasn't definitive evidence of any government spying and tampering, and either with the intention of starting this movement or simply letting people know, he was a big push in the right direction.
tldr: he's a w
I don't really like this framing because it makes it sound like if you care for privacy you are some form of fringe advocate.
We should always try to reframe:
Would you be ok with government employees or law enforcement indiscriminately opening your letters? Ask any senior and the answer is a clear no.
So why are we discussing this as if privacy is entirely optional as soon as you change medium from written letters to emails, sms, instant message?
"Would you be ok with government employees or law enforcement indiscriminately opening the letters of illegal immigrants?"
You'd immediately get the answer yes. Of course, in order to find the illegal immigrant letters they have to open _all_ of the letters.
People will give law enforcement huge amounts of power because they think it will be used against groups they don't like.
I suspect the percentage would be surprisingly high.
Unfortunately normal people don’t really care that much about privacy (even if we all think everyone should).
"Hey, sometimes people try to send bombs through the mail. Would you be okay with the government opening 1% of packages, inspecting them, and re-sealing them to make sure they're safe?
... what if they threw in a coupon so the next package mailed is free?"
(... and suddenly I've discovered of my own psyche that if those "The TSA inspected this bag" slips included a coupon for a free coffee, the visceral response to their presence would do a 180. "Oh, sweet! Free coffee!").
[0] Like the people on the Cypherpunks mailing list
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puzzle_Palace
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann#Arms_Export_Co...
(I assume the 85% number is made up, but for whatever the number is the point stands)
That's how corrupt the system is. You get punished for revealing crimes against everyone.
Who is going to erect statues for him and people like him?
Actually, the world might be a nicer place with more statues and less goofy abstract modernist art in public for even more money than bronzes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Garden_of_American_He...
Usually, one has to kill some people to have a statue erected for him. /s
(1) Russ Tice: USAF intelligence analyst
(2) William Binney: NSA Technical Director.
(3) Thomas Tamm: DOJ lawyer
(4) Thomas A. Drake: senior executive at NSA
Each of them was a senior position relative to Snowden and Klein and all these cases were shut down. What change Snowden had to do traditionally by the book whistleblow or tiny traditional leak. He made the conscious decision to take the information so that they could not shut him down, and make a scene from outside the US (Hong Kong) so that there would be time to talk to the press.
Snowden made a political crime that was morally justified. It was not self serving. It turns out that Americans don't care but at least he made a splash.
Thank goodness he took his oath more seriously than the "I was just following orders" crowd. We know from WW2 that "I was just following orders" is not a legitimate excuse to help facilitate grave atrocities, like all of those other NSA employees did every single day, in violation of their own oaths that they each swore.
To be clear, all 3 are personal heroes of mine.
He was a true and brave whistleblower.
I had the luck of getting a hold of his docs when they were under court seal, and we published them at Wired.
Only met and interviewed him later. He was a gentle man with a moral compass. A rarity even among whistleblowers.
The world is poorer without him.
I actually tried to find a legal way to rewatch it the other day, but all of my current subscriptions list it with "rights expired" or some such.
On second thought, maybe make up your own mind before you dip into that.
[0] https://open.spotify.com/episode/1euFlDCuryFSzMw6BjQCWA