For Tash Hepting, the lead plaintiff in the pending anti-domestic wiretapping case against AT&T, government spying runs in the family.
"The biggest reason for me for getting involved has to do with what happened to my father when he was a teenager," Tash told THREAT LEVEL.
As the 36 year old Tash tells it, his father Rick landed himself on a government watch list when Rick was a thirteen year-old into ham and shortwave radio. In the late 1950s, Rick managed to tune in a station in China, and sent off the customary postcard that says to a shortwave station, "Hey, I pulled in your signal."
Like any other station, the one in Communist China sent back a QSL card -- giving Rick bragging rights that he pulled in a Chinese station -- and then added his name and address to a Communist party propaganda mailing list. Soon after the 13 year-old got another note in the mail, this one from the U.S. government saying he was now under surveillance.
The monitoring continued for years, Tash says, and a childhood friend of his mothers inexplicably cut off contact with the couple, who married straight out of high school, when he joined the ROTC, won his officer's commission and shipped off to Vietnam.
When he came back and left the military, he apologized to Tash's parents, saying he was told that he had to cut off contact with them before he could get his stripes.
Another family friend applied for a job at the defense contracting firm Lockheed Martin and needed to get a security clearance. Without checking first, he listed Tash's parents.
"Obviously, he did not get the job," Hepting said. "They also never bothered to contact my parents as a reference check."
"It wasn't that I was sat down one day and my parents explained to me that the government had monitored my dad," Tash said. "It was just a kind of a fact of life in the household and obviously my parents did their best to teach me to respect civil liberties and that there should be checks and balances on authority."
That belief, not the promise of a big pay day, is why the Bay Area native and father of two says he decided to become a plaintiff in the case the San Francisco-based civil libeties group known as the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed against AT&T in January, 2006.
That case is known as Hepting vs. AT&T, and accuses the telecom giant of letting the government wiretap the internet's backbone via special rooms in their internet switching facility and turning over phone records of millions of Americans for government data-mining.
The suit contends that that sharing means that AT&T violated the privacy of all of their customers, even a given customer wasn't targeted by the NSA specifically.
The suit has defied court watchers' expectations by surviving multiple court rounds in front of a judge appointed by former President George H.W. Bush.
Its fate now currently lies in the hands of both Congress and the U.S. Ninth Circuit Appeals Court.
Hepting has mostly been just the name on a docket sheet for the past two years.
But Tash decided to step forward in the last few weeks as he watched Congress taking steps to provide retroactive amnesty to AT&T and heard the President repeatedly deride the lawsuit with his name on it as a money-grab by sleazy plaintiff attorneys.
"The president is saying this is all about trial lawyers and money," Hepting said. "I feel a little slandered about that. That devalues everything I believe in [...] and basically says that I am greedy and doing this for monetary reasons ,instead of why I am really doing this. This is about the rule of law and there being consequences when you break the law."
Hepting, a longtime techie and EFF supporter, responded in January 2006 to an email to EFF supporters asking for people who lived in California who used AT&T services to contact the group.
After long discussions with his wife, Hepting decided to join the suit, despite calling himself a "relatively private person."
He doesn't want the name of the Silicon Valley start-up he works for publicized, though some of his co-workers have discovered his participation.
One benefit? Old friends have tracked him down after figuring out he was the Hepting suing the giant telecom.
Hepting doesn't claim he was spied on specifically or that his stepping forward got him marked for surveillance, despite all the jokes people make when they find out about the suit.
"I don't think and certainly hope that speaking up for civil liberties is enough to land you into active spying," Tash said. "But there is a chilling effect when you see what is going on."
Tash has only attended one of the hearings that featured his name -- the 2007 hearing where the Ninth Circuit heard arguments about whether the "state secrets privilege" required that the case be thrown out.
That power lets the government have suits dismissed if the proceedings are likely to spill government secrets, but the federal judge handling all the cases against the telecoms ruled that the government had admitted some of the alleged wiretapping actually happened so the case could proceed.
At that August hearing, Judge Harry Pregerson responded to the government lawyer's argument that the courts needed to trust the executive branch that secrets were at risk, by asking "We have to take the word of the members of the executive branch that something is a state secret?"
Tash is patriotic about that moment .
"That makes your proud to see the interplay of the branches of government in action," Hepting said.
Though the three appeals court judges ruled in November on a related case argued the same day as Hepting, they have yet to issue their decision in Hepting -- which is either a decision to play politics or stay out of politics, depending on your view point.
Hepting originally began talking to the media out of desperation that the case would be killed by Congress -- nervously doing interviews last week with the Wall Street Journal and National Public Radio on the same day.
He's more optimistic now with the publication of an investigative pice in the Wall Street Journal Monday that elucidated the sprawling nature of the government's domestic spying and with the unveiling Tuesday of a new anti-immunity spying bill. That bill is scheduled for a vote Thursday.
That bill proposes to let the telecoms to defend themselves by showing a judge in secret any orders or legal documents given to them by the administration, which has blocked them from showing those documents, saying they are too secret for even a federal judge to see.
"This week has been a great swing and everything is turning in a great direction," Hepting said. "The House is trying to fight against immunity and work for a compromise. I am really proud of them since it's win-win. We get our day in court and it gives the telecoms the abiltity to defend themselves."
Photo: Tash Hepting and his family, courtesy Tash Hepting
