We’ve known the Americans couldn’t be trusted to run our internet for decades—at least since 2005. That was the year an unassuming guy walked into my office at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in San Francisco’s Mission District. His name was Mark Klein, and he had an incredible story. Recently retired from being a network engineer at AT&T, Klein brought a tranche of files from his old job that documented how his bosses had ordered him to build a secret room at the company’s Folsom Street office, and then insert a beam-splitter into AT&T’s fibre backbone in order to provide the National Security Agency with access to all of AT&T’s network traffic—warrantless, illegal access to the world’s communications.