Mark Klein's statement was dated Thursday 6 April 2006, and Wired News published it in full the next day. "For 22 and 1/2 years I worked as an AT&T technician," it opened — first in New York, then in California, until he retired in May 2004. In 2002, he wrote, the site manager of his San Francisco office told him "to expect a visit from a National Security Agency agent", who was to interview a management-level technician for a special job. In January 2003, touring the floors AT&T occupied in a building at 611 Folsom Street, he saw "a new room being built adjacent to the 4ESS switch room where the public's phone calls are routed." Regular technicians were not allowed in. It was on the sixth floor: Room 641A.
In October 2003 the company moved him into the building "to oversee the Worldnet Internet room", where he saw how the new room was fed. Fibre-optic circuits carrying WorldNet traffic ran through a splitter cabinet on the seventh floor, "which diverts some of the light signal to the secret room"; in Klein's later description the splitters were glass prisms dividing the laser beam, each half of the split carrying all of the data. Among the circuits were the peering links joining WorldNet to other networks, such as UUNET, Qwest, Sprint and Level 3. The documents he kept, dated December 2002 and January 2003, listed Sun servers, Juniper routers and a Narus STA 6400, "a 'Semantic Traffic Analyzer'". Similar cabinets, he had learned, were going into Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego.
Early in 2006 he had walked into the Electronic Frontier Foundation's San Francisco office unannounced; the foundation's Cindy Cohn later recalled his opening line as "You folks care about privacy?" Its class action, Hepting v. AT&T, filed on 31 January, claimed that the company was unlawfully collaborating with the agency in a programme to wiretap and data-mine its customers' communications. The Justice Department first asked the EFF not to file Klein's papers, then found on review that they were not classified and dropped the objection; in April they went to the court under seal. AT&T asked for them back as proprietary, and said it followed the law whenever government agencies asked for its help; the agency's spokesman said that discussing operational issues, actual or alleged, would be irresponsible.
The government's answer came on 28 April: it would "assert the military and state secrets privilege" and intervene to seek dismissal, adding that the assertion was neither a confirmation nor a denial of the allegations, and in May it asked the judge to read secret sworn statements from the director of national intelligence and the head of the NSA. AT&T did not dispute that Klein had worked for it, but the inferences he drew were disputed, and Judge Vaughn Walker set his declaration aside for the time being when he refused to dismiss on 20 July 2006. The appeal was still pending when Congress acted: the FISA Amendments Act, signed on 10 July 2008, shielded carriers from such suits on the Attorney General's certification, and Walker dismissed the case on 3 June 2009. The Ninth Circuit affirmed on 29 December 2011, and in October 2012 the Supreme Court declined to hear it.
Drives at the Gate
On Monday 10 April 2006 the Los Angeles Times reported what was on sale at a bazaar no more than 200 yards from the main gate of the American base at Bagram: knives, watches, refrigerators, and flash drives taken from military laptops, sold as used hardware. On drives its reporter obtained, the paper found documents marked "Secret", presentations naming suspected militants targeted for "kill or capture", and rosters with the names and Social Security numbers of nearly 700 service members; an American military spokesman declined to comment on the drives or what was on them. Shopkeepers said the drives left the base with its Afghan workers, about 2,000 of them, hidden behind the identity cards hung around their necks. Within two days the military had ordered an investigation, and Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry a review of how computer hardware was accounted for. On 13 April soldiers came through the market, one shopkeeper said, with "a box full of afghanis", buying all they could find. The Associated Press examined about forty drives and found most of them blank or broken.
Seven Records
On 20 April 2006 federal prosecutors in Los Angeles charged Eric McCarty, 25, of San Diego, with transmitting code to damage the University of Southern California's online application system. On 17 June 2005, they said, he had typed database commands into the site's login form, an SQL injection, and got past its password check to a database holding records on more than 275,000 applicants. He then reported the hole anonymously to SecurityFocus, which told the university; USC shut the site, and prosecutors put the outage at about ten days and the damage at $140,000. The FBI's affidavit cited a file of seven records on his computer. "The computer trespass laws are very, very tricky," said Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. McCarty pleaded guilty in September to accessing a protected computer; on 21 December Judge Percy Anderson gave him six months' home detention within three years' probation and ordered $36,761 in restitution, the prosecutor having called him "just a glory hacker" and his lawyers having said he meant to draw attention to flaws in the university's security.
The War Room's Pen Drives
On 5 and 6 April 2006 the Central Bureau of Investigation arrested five people, three of them former naval officers — one detained at Delhi's airport as he arrived from London — and searched seventeen places in Delhi, Chandigarh, Mumbai, Goa and Muzaffarpur. The case concerned classified material from the Navy's war room at naval headquarters, more than 7,000 pages from the war room and the air defence headquarters by the prosecution's later count, and the means was the pen drive. It had surfaced when intelligence officers, following up a complaint about an Air Force wing commander, found one in his possession carrying naval information. A Navy board of inquiry sat for about two months; three officers, a former Director of Naval Operations among them, were dismissed without trial under Article 311 of the Constitution. The Defence Ministry passed the matter to the CBI on 18 February 2006, and it was registered under the Official Secrets Act.
The mechanics needed no hacking: files copied to something small enough to pocket, and carried out. The court record since moves in years. Charges were framed against five accused in August 2014, for criminal conspiracy and under the Official Secrets Act, and all five pleaded not guilty; the man named as prime accused, last reported in London, had been declared a proclaimed offender. In a related prosecution a retired naval captain was convicted of spying under the Act on 7 July 2018 and four days later sentenced to seven years' rigorous imprisonment, and a retired commander was acquitted. That month the hearing in the main case was reported to be "still going on"; this archive has found no verdict reported since.
Google's statistical translation goes live for Arabic
On 28 April 2006 Franz Och, a research scientist at Google, announced that the company's own statistical translation system was online, for Arabic into English and English into Arabic. Most commercial translators of the day, he noted, were rules-based, needing linguists to define vocabularies and grammars; Google's was fed billions of words instead, text in the target language and aligned examples of human translation, from which statistical learning built the model. Arabic was a hard test, its words needing to be reordered over long distances and its morphology very rich, and Och conceded that the system did better with news than with novels. A decade later a neural network took its place, as September 2016 recounts. The journal Machine Learning's April issue carried a method from Pierre Geurts, Damien Ernst and Louis Wehenkel of the University of Liège: extremely randomised trees, an ensemble that strongly randomises both the attribute and the cut-point chosen at each split, prized by its authors for accuracy and, above all, cheap computation. As extra-trees it went into scikit-learn, the Python machine-learning library.
Grisoft buys Ewido; New York sues Direct Revenue
On 19 April 2006 Grisoft, the Brno company behind AVG Anti-Virus, announced that it had bought Ewido Networks, a German firm whose scanner for spyware, adware, Trojans and worms was free, with real-time protection for those who paid. Both were privately held; no price was given. Karel Obluk, Grisoft's chief technology officer, said Ewido's product included "a very advanced emulator" that could strengthen AVG's own engine. In June Grisoft launched it as Ewido Anti-Spyware 4.0, alone or bundled with AVG; renamed AVG Anti-Spyware, it was folded into AVG 8.0. On 4 April New York's attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, had sued Direct Revenue of New York City, alleging that its VX2, Aurora and OfferOptimizer programs were bundled unannounced with free games and browser tools, tracked browsing to serve pop-ups and sometimes reinstalled themselves after deletion. The company said those practices had ended six months before and called its software adware, not spyware. It agreed in February 2007 to give up $1.5 million to settle FTC charges and closed that October; in March 2008 a state judge dismissed New York's suit.
⏳ Time capsule — April 2006
- On 6 April the National Geographic Society unveiled in Washington the only known copy of the Gospel of Judas, a Coptic text in a leather-bound papyrus codex found in the 1970s in the desert near El Minya, in Egypt.
- On 11 April the European Space Agency's Venus Express fired its main engine for about fifty minutes and was captured into orbit around Venus, 153 days after its launch from Baikonur. Designed for two years, it worked until late 2014; ESA announced the end of the mission on 16 December that year.
- On 13 April Google Calendar opened as a limited beta; it did not leave beta until July 2009.
- On 28 April a Delta II rocket lifted CloudSat and CALIPSO from Vandenberg in California. CloudSat's 94-gigahertz radar measured the height and properties of clouds until it was permanently turned off in December 2023.
Two Halves of the Light
Twenty years on, no court has found what the room on the sixth floor was for. Hepting ended on immunity; Jewel v. NSA, the suit against the agency itself, ended on standing and state secrets, a judge ruling in April 2019 that Klein "cannot establish the content, function, or purpose of the secure room". What April 2006 changed was what could be pictured. The New York Times had reported on surveillance without warrants the previous December; Klein added a floor plan, a cabinet and a model number. In June 2013 the argument moved to documents from inside the agency, British probes on internet links among them. Klein received the EFF's Pioneer Award in 2008, published his account in 2009, and died at home in Oakland on 8 March 2025, aged 79.
The month's smaller stories ran on into later editions. Most of the Bagram drives the Associated Press examined were blank or broken, but the device was the lesson: in 2008 one carried malicious code onto a Central Command network and the Pentagon banned removable drives, as August 2010 recounts. McCarty's question, whether proving a website's flaw is itself the offence, returned in June 2010 with an AT&T web page, and on 19 May 2022 the Justice Department said it would no longer charge good-faith security research under the federal hacking law. The Navy met the pen drive again in July 2012, when malware on drives was reported collecting files at the Eastern Naval Command; the war-room trial was still being heard twelve years after the raids.