On the ABCNews.com blog today, confirmation of a rumor that's been circulating in journalism circles for about a year.
AT&T technician Mark Klein offered the Los Angeles Times more than a hundred pages of technical papers which documented how the NSA was installing "splitters" to copy domestic and overseas internet traffic. He described the program as "an illegal and Orwellian project," and worked for two months with LAT reporter Joe Menn to bring it to light — but higher-ups at that paper killed the story. So Klein took the information to the New York Times, which then broke news of the internet wiretapping program in April, 2006.
(…)Klein says he was told the [LAT] story had been killed at the request of then-Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and then-director of the NSA Gen. Michael Hayden. The Los Angeles Times' decision was made by the paper's editor at the time, Dean Baquet, now the Washington bureau chief of The New York Times.Baquet confirmed to ABCNews.com he talked with Negroponte and Hayden but says "government pressure played no role in my decision not to run the story." Baquet says he and managing editor Doug Frantz decided "we did not have a story, that we could not figure out what was going on" based on Klein's highly technical documents.
The reporter, Menn, declined to comment, but Baquet says he knows "Joe disagreed and was very disappointed."
"Very disappointed" has to be the understatement of the century.
Link to ABC blog item, from a report by Brian Ross and Vic Walter. (via Romenesko )
UPDATE: Wired's excellent but impossibly-titled security blog 27B Stroke 6 has a related post — Link.
