I never believed that the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against AT&T, alleging that the company helped the National Security Agency coduct illegal spy operations, had much of a future.

Consider the EFF's central claim in the case -- that AT&T and NSA collaborated to spy upon tens of millions of American citizens, including both domestic and overseas phone calls. EFF isn't just looking for the proverbial smoking gun; it needs to find a smoking howitzer to prove such a dramatic, and politically explosive, charge.

Boom. Meet Mark Klein, an AT&T engineer who spent 22 years working for the company's New York and San Francisco switching centers. His appearance as an EFF witness in the case -- with documents supporting many of his claims -- could change everything. His statements, assuming their veracity, are nothing short of infuriating.While on assignment in AT&T's San Francisco switching center during late 2002 and early 2003, Klein claims that he saw and heard about the NSA engaging, with AT&T's full support, in some profoundly disturbing activities:

A copy of Klein's full statement is available at Wired News. The following excerpt details how he discovered AT&T wasn't just diverting its own traffic through the NSA's traffic-analysis hardware, but was also giving the agency access to its peering partners' packet-switched traffic:

Could the NSA possibly, by any stretch of a sane, sober observer'simagination, have required such a massive, geograhically distributed surveillance apparatus -- what one watchdog group describes (with the assistance of a diagram that will make your blood run cold when you realize the implications) as the "NSA Surveillance Octopus?"

"Based on my understanding of the connections and equipment at issue," Klein wrote in his statement, "it appears the NSA is capable of conducting what amounts to vacuum-cleaner surveillance of all the data crossing the internet -- whether that be peoples' e-mail, web surfing or any other data.

"And unlike the controversy over targeted wiretaps of individuals' phone calls," he concludes, "this potential spying appears to be applied wholesale to all sorts of internet communications of countless citizens"

President Bush has acknowledged that he repeatedly approved the NSA surveillance operations, in spite of the fact that conducting such operations within the United States is, at best, a legal gray area. Yet he also maintains that in rare cases when NSA wanted access to domestic communications, it would seek a search warrant to do so.

If Mark Klein does, indeed, represent the smoking gun in this case, then it looks to me like he's aimed not at AT&T or even the NSA, but rather at the Bush Administration itself. Indeed, this is the system whose existence the President says he personally approved on at least 30 occasions over the past year. If Klein's testimony holds up in court, it will fall upon the President to explain why this "limited" operation required a surveillance infrastructure capable of spying upon a substantial percentage of the American population.