HEDRICK SMITH: The inside story of what the NSA has actually been up to was discovered here in San Francisco by Mark Klein, a long-time Internet technician for AT&T.
MARK KLEIN, Fmr. AT&T Technician: In 2002, I was sitting at my workstation one day, and some email came in saying that somebody from the National Security Agency, NSA, was going to come visit for some business. This NSA representative showed up at the door. I happened to be the one who opened the door. I let him in.
DONALD HENRY, Fmr. AT&T Manager: He was doing a background check for a security clearance for one of our field engineers. He was going to be working at the Folsom Street office, and they were building a secure facility there.
MARK KLEIN: And I heard from our manager, Don, that he's working on some new room that's being built. So people start speculating, "Now, what's this new room being built?"
HEDRICK SMITH: Mark Klein got suspicious when the workmen constructing the room treated it as hush-hush.
So how do you know that it wasn't just some kind of new-fangled AT&T thing that was going beyond what had already been established for its security purposes elsewhere?
MARK KLEIN: They wouldn't need the NSA for that purpose. The odd thing about the whole room, of course, was that only this one guy who had clearance from the NSA could get in there. So that changed the whole context of what this is about.
HEDRICK SMITH: Klein's job was to maintain AT&T's Internet service for several million customers, domestic and international traffic all mixed together.
MARK KLEIN: We're talking about billions and billions of bits of data going across every second, right?
HEDRICK SMITH: A co-worker showed Klein how their Internet room was directly connected to the secret NSA room through a special device called a splitter.
MARK KLEIN: So what they do with the splitter is they intercept that data stream and make copies of all the data, and those copies go down on the cable to the secret room.
BRIAN REID, Internet Systems Consortium: What this thing was is a very full-scale device to take all communication, voice and data, and send it both wherever it was supposed to go but also shunted off to a little listening room.
HEDRICK SMITH: So what exactly was going on in that listening room? Klein found clues at work one day.
MARK KLEIN: I came across these three documents and I brought them back to my desk. And when I started looking at it, I looked at it more, and finally, it dawned on me sort of all at once, and I almost fell out of my chair,
HEDRICK SMITH: Klein eventually found detailed designs for the secret room. One of the first to see his documents was Internet expert Brian Reid.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/etc/script.html
Extensive interview of him here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/interviews/klein.html 
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