Spying on the Home Front

What did you do for AT&T? How long did you work there?

I worked at AT&T for 22 and a half years. My job was basically to keep the systems going. They were computer systems, network communication systems, Internet equipment, Voice over Internet [Protocol (VoIP)] equipment. I tested circuits long distance across the country. That was my job: to keep the network up. ...

So you handled the hottest high-tech stuff that AT&T had.

That's right. Our job was to keep everything up and running smoothly.

What goes on inside the building on Folsom Street [in San Francisco]?

While I was there we worked on three floors which belonged to AT&T. The sixth floor was the traditional phone switch, ... which handled the public's telephone calls and was the workhorse of the phone system. The seventh floor was where the Internet room was, and that's where I spent a lot of my time. That's where there are a lot of Cisco routers, a lot of fiber-optic lines coming in and going out. The eighth floor is more diversified, more routers and other kinds of equipment, what's called multiplex equipment and various kinds of telecommunications equipment.

So this is an operations center. Are we talking about serving San Francisco? Are we talking about serving the state of California? Are we talking about America and Asia? What's the traffic that's going through there?

Well, this is an important hub for the Bay Area in terms of if you're talking about Internet. There's lots of Internet traffic, as you can imagine, that goes in and out of this office, probably hundreds of fiber-optic lines that go out, carrying billions -- that's billions with a "B" -- billions of bits of data going in and out every second every day. So all the Web surfing you're doing, whatever you're doing on the Internet -- the pictures, the video, the Voice over Internet -- all that stuff's going in and out of there.

And then of course there's also the traditional phone switch, which is doing what it's been doing since before the Internet.

Handling millions of calls. ...

Handling millions and millions of phone calls, right. That's its job.

So this is a big hub.

It's a big hub, yes.

Take me back to the summer of 2002. What happens? ...

... In 2002 I was sitting at my workstation one day, and some e-mail came in. I opened it up, and it was just a notice saying that somebody from the National Security Agency, NSA, was going to come visit for some business. They didn't say what, of course, just letting us know. I was also told the same thing by the manager of the office.

Don Henry?

Don Henry, who mentioned that there was going to be a visit from this person from the National Security Agency. ... That struck me as a little odd to begin with, because I remember from back in the '70s, the NSA is not supposed to be doing domestic spying, so what were they doing in an AT&T company office? It struck me as odd, but I didn't know anything more about it, so I just let it lie and waited for the guy to come.

Sometime later, maybe a few weeks -- I don't remember exactly -- he did show up. This NSA representative showed up at the door. I happened to be the one who opened the door. I let him in. I directed him to the appropriate people. He was very closemouthed and unsmiling, and he did his business. ... I didn't hear anything about it for a while, and I thought, well, that was over and I'll probably never hear anything about it again. So I never kept the e-mail. I thought it was just routine e-mail, and I'd never hear about it again. That whole incident probably took place in, I think it was the summer of 2002.

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