In a Democracy Now interview from May 12, 2006, Wired reporter Ryan Seigel described a lawsuit mounted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) against ATT in San Francisco:

"The EFF lawsuit is fairly interesting. They are building on the work of the L.A. Times, but they also, as they were preparing their lawsuit, retired ATT technician Mark Klein, who worked for the company for 22 years, approached them, came up to their offices and says, “I have some documents,” and those documents remain under seal, but from what Mark Klein has said publicly, what he saw when he was working there, he saw ATT build a secret room in its switching center in San Francisco, where they took portions of the fiber optic cable that carry internet traffic and shunted it into a private room, a little secret room that supposedly had a large data bank with some secret data mining hardware, and he said he also saw — he had also heard that this had happened in other switching locations, and ostensibly the documents he turned over to EFF and which have been filed with the court, those are now – he wants those to be unsealed."

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