The Internet Has Become Too American to Trust

We’ve known the Americans couldn’t be trusted to run our internet for decades—at least since 2005. That was the year an unassuming guy walked into my office at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in San Francisco’s Mission District. His name was Mark Klein, and he had an incredible story. Recently retired from being a network engineer at AT&T, Klein brought a tranche of files from his old job that documented how his bosses had ordered him to build a secret room at the company’s Folsom Street office, and then insert a beam-splitter into AT&T’s fibre backbone in order to provide the National Security Agency with access to all of AT&T’s network traffic—warrantless, illegal access to the world’s communications.

Yes, the world. Because the world sends its fibre lines across the ocean to make landfall in America; companies like AT&T provide interchange between these lines, serving as the global data hub rather than requiring all 200-odd countries run direct fibre links to and from every other nation. This reduces the number of expensive transoceanic fibre cables from tens of thousands to merely hundreds.

I’ve spent twenty-five years at the EFF, the world’s oldest and most important digital rights group. And we hear from a lot of people with incredible stories, and not all of them are in possession of their senses. But every now and again we get someone like Mark. Indisputably sane, with a story so paranoid it sounds like a delusion. But Mark was telling the truth. So, we sued the NSA. We brought a series of cases that dragged on for years, capturing national attention. It led to a remarkable exchange in the United States Senate where Ron Wyden, ranking member on the Senate intelligence committee, point blank asked James Clapper, the US director of national intelligence, whether the NSA was engaged in mass surveillance of the sort described in our lawsuit. And right there, in front of the Senate and the C-SPAN cameras, Clapper just straight up lied.

Now, one of the people watching the C-SPAN feed that day was a young, idealistic NSA contractor named Edward Snowden. At that moment, Snowden lost all confidence that his bosses cared about the law or the constitution. And we know what happened next.


https://thewalrus.ca/the-internet-has-become-too-american-to-trust/