Here's another good reason not to provide AT&T with immunity from lawsuits. We all know that they cooperated with the NSA to collect data on its customers. (See The Weekly Wonk, Warrantless Surveillance, 5/13/06) Now Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician turned whistleblower, says that a copy "of all internet traffic passing over AT&T lines was copied into a locked room at the company's San Francisco office -- to which only employees with National Security Agency clearance had access -- via a cable splitting device." Remember, AT&T owns many of the lines used by other companies, which means that it wasn't only AT&T subscribers who got caught in this web. "My job was to connect circuits into the splitter device which was hard-wired to the secret room. And effectively, the splitter copied the entire data stream of those internet cables into the secret room -- and we're talking about phone conversations, email web browsing, everything that goes across the internet. . . We're talking about domestic traffic as well as international traffic." Klein believes that AT&T has similar operations in place in as many as 20 other sites. (ABC News) That explains Bush's push to get them immunity. They're still doing it. And Senator Arlen Specter (R, PA) "is drafting a compromise" on the retroactive immunity for telecoms. Specter's amendment "would make the federal government -- instead of the phone companies -- the defendant in about 40 pending lawsuits across the country." (The Hill) Great. Let the taxpayers pick up another corporate tab.