April 7, 2006: New York Times Publishes Its First Mention of AT&T Whistleblower’s Allegations

The New York Times publishes its first report on the allegations by former AT&T technician Mark Klein (see December 15-31, 2005 and July 7, 2009), who is providing evidence and documentation to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for that organization’s lawsuit against AT&T (see December 31, 2005 and January 31, 2006). The three-paragraph squib, buried deep in the pages of the “A” section, says that AT&T “cooperated with the National Security Agency in 2003 to install equipment capable of ‘vacuum-cleaner surveillance’ of email messages and other Internet traffic.” The report is based in part on a recent press release issued by Klein (see April 6, 2006), and notes the EFF lawsuit in passing. It admits that Klein has provided some of the documentation to the press, if not to the Times itself (see Mid-February - Late March, 2006), but simply writes that Klein’s documents “describe a room at the AT&T Internet and telephone hub in San Francisco that contained a piece of equipment that could sift through large volumes of Internet traffic.” Klein later calls the brevity and incompleteness of the report “puzzling,” and will say, “Their only purpose seemed to be to signal the government that I had ‘provided’ the New York Times with the documents, while minimizing the story for everyone else.” Klein will speculate, “It looked like some kind of backroom brawl was going on, but the public could not know the details.” [New York Times, 4/7/2006; Klein, 2009, pp. 70] A week later, the Times will publish a more in-depth article (see April 12, 2006).