NSA Wiretapping Whistleblower

Kagu writes "ABC News is running a short piece about an interview with former NSA Employee Russell Tice and his allegations that the NSA wiretaps are more pervasive than believed and used in ways he believes violated the law. "

Comments

Much more info on Democracy Now

[TripMaster Monkey]

A lot more info on this subject, including a transcript of the interview of Russell Tice by Amy Goodman, can be found here.

From the interview:

RUSSELL TICE: Well, as far as an intelligence officer, especially a SIGINT officer at N.S.A., we're taught from very early on in our careers that you just do not do this. This is probably the number one commandment of the SIGINT Ten Commandments as a SIGINT officer. You will not spy on Americans. It is drilled into our head over and over and over again in security briefings, at least twice a year, where you ultimately have to sign a paper that says you have gotten the briefing. Everyone at N.S.A. who's a SIGINT officer knows that you do not do this. Ultimately, so do the leaders of N.S.A., and apparently the leaders of N.S.A. have decided that they were just going to go against the tenets of something that's a gospel to a SIGINT officer.

Re:Wiretaps without warrants, that is...

[eldavojohn]

It doesn't bother me that they want to wiretap suspected terrorists, but why the no-warrant stuff? Can't they just get a classified warrant?

Well, in the article, they mentioned using data mining to find when the word "jihad" was used in a conversation. In reality, they don't have many suspected terrorists so they would like to just use this technology on the largest set of civilians as possible. In order to do the paper work and justify this action ... well, they'd have to go through the warrant process for every American.

So they bend the rules a little and overlook some of our rights and suddenly they have a great tool for catching terrorists or anyone that uses the wrong language!

I hope you never become a "suspected terrorist" because nowadays, the word "suspected" seems to be equivalent with "guilty" in the eyes of Homeland Security.

Searching for keywords may or may not work

[digitaldc]

"If you picked the word 'jihad' out of a conversation," Tice said, "the technology exists that you focus in on that conversation, and you pull it out of the system for processing." According to Tice, intelligence analysts use the information to develop graphs that resemble spiderwebs linking one suspect's phone number to hundreds or even thousands more.

It can be argued that people who don't want to have their conversations monitored will not use keywords such as these that tip off the eavesdroppers or technology that recognizes them.
And conversely, people may use meaningless conversations with many keywords to delay the processing of these investigations.

Re:Uh, yeah. "Spying on Americans"

[stinerman]

Tracing calls inbound or outbound to known terrorist phone numbers, in itself is probable-cause, no?

I'd say it is. I don't think anyone would disagree. Either you're intentionally missing the point in order to troll or you're just ignorant.

The point is the NSA needs A WARRANT to do the tap. Hell, FISA lets them get a retroactive warrant for up to 72 hours after the fact. What is stopping Bush & Co. from getting a warrant from a secret court that has never denied a single warrant application in all of 2004? Its very likely that they had no probable cause to monitor these people.

Just another non-issue.

Apparently the 4th amendment is a "non-issue".

Re:Wiretaps without warrants, that is...

[lawpoop]

So get congress to write a new bill, don't just charge ahead and break the law.

It just shows you Bush's comtempt for the rule of law. They couldn't do what they wanted to do legally, so they just went ahead and did it anyway.