( – promoted by buhdydharma )
I found this story at Cryptogon, but it originated at ComputerWorld:
The NSA Wiretapping Story Nobody Wanted
This demonstrates, yet again, how incestuous is the relationship between the corporate-owned Big Brother government and its Mouthpiece Media:
I was most worried at the time when the LA Times was killing my story, but at the same time the LA Times showed it to the government. Then I really was panicking because that meant that 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’) in your book. What happened there?
Klein: The LA Times was particularly egregious because they were planning a front-page spread. 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, who was John Negroponte at the time. So that meant the government knew it. And then a few weeks later the LA Times killed the story. So the only thing you can read into is that basically the government squashed the story. [The LA Times’ editor in early 2006, Dean Baquet, said the government had nothing to do with the decision. ‘We did not have a story, that we could not figure out what was going on,’ he told ABC News — ed.]
IDGNS: How long did they have the story?
Klein: I started dealing with them in late January 2006, and in February they showed it to the government, and then they started wobbling. By the end of March 2006, they officially told me the story was killed.
IDGNS: Did they cover it in April, after it became public?
Klein: No that was funny. After it finally hit the news everywhere else, The LA Times didn’t run with the stuff I’d given them. They’d squashed the whole thing.
This guy’s lucky he didn’t get real depressed and commit suicide, or perhaps that he doesn’t fly in small planes.
But this is what happens to whistleblowers in our society these days.
A little more background:
Klein, 64, was a retired AT&T communications technician in December 2005, when he read the New York Times story that blew the lid off the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. Secretly authorized in 2002, the program lets the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) monitor telephone conversations and e-mail messages of people inside the U.S. to identify suspected terrorists. Klein knew right away that he had proof – documents from his time at AT&T – that could provide a snapshot of how the program was siphoning data off of the AT&T network in San Francisco.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 (EFF). 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.
With the EFF on board, Klein was briefly a media celebrity – the man who had the guts to expose the NSA’s secret wiretapping program. In his book he provides the documents and the stories that illustrate how all of this transpired.
He had to self-publish his book, “Wiring up the Big Brother Machine … and Fighting It” of course. I mean, what a surprise.
Obama has done absolutely nothing to stop this crap, BTW, and is commented on by Klein:
The first layer of the Democratic party leadership, it turns out, had been knowledgeable and briefed on this program and was complicit, in my view.
Yeah, we just need more Democrats and that will change everything.
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Thanks!
if the same sort of
editingsquashing,is going on in 2009?
thank for connecting the dots, Inky99
If I am entirely free I am always at risk, If I am entirely safe I am certainly a slave.
Freedom has risks, thralldom does not
What should have been one of the big stories of the early 90’s never saw the light of day in the MSM.
…have always been up against the media’s incestuous relationship with the government and industries. 30 years ago when we went to TMI to investigate and discovered a horror story writ very large, they all backed down after taking our stuff to the ‘bad guys’. CBS, NBC, WaPo, New York Times… this was before there was cable, CNN or Fox or any of those.
Heck, WaPo “killed” the story AFTER my husband and brother were attacked (and my brother was killed). Not much suicide or small plane stuff in the nuclear arsenal. They’re inordinately fond of those mysterious “one-car accidents.”
I guess the worst part of it was that our investigation was covered under a designated agent provision in 10CFR.21 – we were hired to get the goods and report. Unfortunately, it took us all of about an hour to figure out the NRC on-site was there aiding and abetting the cover-up, not protecting the public. Thus receivers of last resort were Congress and the public themselves. Congress was easier to reach than the public, given the mainstream press’ in-bed relationship with the ‘bad guys’. Congress – House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment – got our stuff in mid-1981. The chair had been my hubby’s debate partner in high school. They sat on it until 1985, when we finally got our opportunity to testify before the NRC’s commissioners. At which point the new WaPo science editor did a lengthy interview and took pictures (hubby’s the only human to eat fire in the newsroom, I’m pretty sure), then they dropped the ball once again when the gub’ment stepped in to post-classify the testimony and evidence.
We did something else with our lives. Thirty years later there’s epidemiological studies that strongly support what we were saying all along. Too late to mitigate the damage or save anybody’s life. I can sure tell you from this distance that I wasn’t impressed then and I’m still not impressed now with the whole “Fourth Estate” posture or any level of government honesty about their sugar-baby nukes. Still as deadly as they ever were, still just as filthy in all applications, still the most dangerous and expensive means of boiling water ever conceived or deployed.
Nothing has changed – they haven’t practiced actual journalism in decades. All told over the years, more than five times as many innocent civilians were killed by TMI than died on 9-11. Which certainly doesn’t inspire automatic discounting of a government hand on the rudder just because innocent people died that sunny September morning in NYC/DC/PA. Lesson learned: You simply cannot make people care about what they don’t want to know.
I would say they are identical twins: Unmasking the MSM: Ladies and Gentlemen, Meet the NSA.