By ADINA YOUNG
Observer Staff
Nov. 15, 2007

Almost two years after a retired AT&T technician blew the whistle on the major telecommunication company for participating in illegal wiretapping, a digital rights company is urging the Supreme Court not to give amnesty to AT&T.

“Companies like AT&T that broke the law and violated their costumers’ privacy, pose no threat to national security,” said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the first person from the company to speak to the technician. “Amnesty, on the other hand, does pose a threat,” he said.

The Supreme Court grants amnesty to organizations, companies or individuals who it believes have done the “right thing” and therefore erases all record of the offense.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit company fighting for the privacy of Americans, said that by granting amnesty to AT&T, the Supreme Court will encourage companies to continue breaking the law and violate the customer’s rights.

“We must hold the phone companies accountable now,” said Bankston. “If you break the law and betray your costumers’ privacy, you will be held accountable.”

Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician from California, announced to the New York Times in December 2005 that AT&T, in cooperation with the National Security Agency and the Bush Administration, set up a “secret-spying room” in the San Francisco building where he worked for a few years before he retired.

The company did not allow him inside the room even though Klein took care of the “installation and maintenance of internet equipment in a newly-constructed, secured room.”

“AT&T provided the National Security Agency with everything that ordinary Americans communicated over the internet,” said Klein. “This program included not only AT&T customers, but everyone who used the Internet because AT&T carries messages for other carriers also.”

Observer Photo by Adina Young
Mark Klein addresses the audience at a news conference regarding domestic spying.

According to an October 2007 article in the Washington Post, the Bush administration argued that companies who helped the government fight terrorism by tapping phones, emails and text messages, should not suffer a penalty because they were participating “in good faith” in counterterrorism.

“It’s not just a few individual calls and it’s not just foreign calls that are routed though the United States,” said Cindy Cohn, director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “It’s surveillance of you and me and millions of ordinary Americans in our everyday conversations.”

On Jan. 31, 2006, after receiving this information from Klein, the Electronic Frontier Foundation took the company to court in Hepting v. AT&T by filing a lawsuit on behalf of AT&T costumers.

In summer 2006, AT&T motioned to dismiss the case for immunity reasons, but Chief Judge Vaughn Walker denied this attempt saying that “AT&T cannot seriously contend that a reasonable entity in its position could have believed that the alleged domestic dragnet was legal.”

Electronic Frontier Foundation still argues that the 4th Amendment, the amendment that guards against “unreasonable searches or seizures”, is in violation because everyone is potentially a target.

“It’s unbelievable and shameful that they could now argue that they didn’t know these statues prohibited them from spying on their customers without a court order and based on their customers say so,” Bankston said.

The Bush Administration and AT&T, with the support of many lobbyists, appealed this decision in August 2007. The appeals court is still debating its decision.