The NSA Wiretapping Story Nobody Wanted

CWmike writes "They sometimes call national security the third rail of politics. Touch it and, politically, you're dead. The cliché doesn't seem far off the mark after reading Mark Klein's new book, Wiring up the Big Brother Machine ... and Fighting It. It's an account of his experiences as the whistleblower who exposed a secret room at a Folsom Street facility in San Francisco that was apparently used to monitor the Internet communications of ordinary Americans. Amazingly, however, nobody wanted to hear his story. In his book he talks about meetings with reporters and privacy groups that went nowhere until a fateful January 20, 2006 meeting with Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Bankston was preparing a lawsuit that he hoped would put a stop to the wiretap program, and Klein was just the kind of witness the EFF was looking for. He spoke with Robert McMillan for an interview."

Comments

'It's a paper's duty to print the news&raise h

[D4C5CE]

Klein: I really was panicking because [...] the government knew everything and probably knew my name, but I didn't have any publicity.
IDGNS: The media merit a full chapter (entitled: 'Going Public vs. Media Chickens'). What happened there?
Klein: [...] They were the first entity I'd given all the documents to. Then they talked to the government about it, and it turned out they were talking to not only the NSA director, but the director of national intelligence

That much for the sad state of "the Fourth Estate, more important than them all" (Edmund Burke) ...

It is a newspaper's duty to print the news and raise hell.

Wilbur F. Storey, 1861