Likelihood of Success

It’s hardly even debatable whether or not telephone technicians should unilaterally — well, along with our elected representatives in the media, of course — decide how the U.S. should go about protecting itself from terrorism, foreign and domestic, is it? ABC’s The Blotter explains how an AT&T technician, Mark Klein, took the inside story of the NSA monitoring program to the LA Times, which couldn’t “follow” his technical explanation of the horrors he had seen. He then contacted the New York Times, which has smarter editors, and they figured it out and broke the story.

Mildly interesting. Far more interesting to me is the concept that this zhlub — see the picture on the ABC link — took it upon himself to decide, contrary to all logic and common sense, that “what he knows won’t help terrorists”:

“The only people that are being kept in the dark is the American people who are being misled and not realizing, not being told that their private information, that their liberties are being destroyed and tramped on,” he said.

So Klein, disturbed by what he saw — knowing nothing, not a thing, about anything other than what he saw, in terms of what policies were being implemented and why — didn’t contact law enforcement, or an attorney, or his supervisors, or make any attempt to keep the lid on something that maybe, possibly, was bigger than his understanding as an AT&T wire-monkey while he at least increased that understanding.

Mark Klein, AT&T technician, made the executive decision to go to the papers “to blow the whistle on what he calls ‘an illegal and Orwellian project.'”

He may be right. I doubt it, and so do a number of people in a lot better position to know. So he may very well be wrong. And what efforts did Mark Klein, AT&T technician, make to avoid screwing up something much bigger than Mark Klein if he was wrong? From what I can see, none.

America, meet your unelected, unappointed ombudsman of national policy: Mark Klein, AT&T technician. (Hat tip to Boing Boing.)