Slashdot Mirror
Whistleblower Claims NSA Spied On Everyone, Targeted Media
JCWDenton writes "Former National Security Agency analyst Russell Tice, who helped expose the NSA's warrantless wiretapping in December 2005, has now come forward with even more startling allegations. Tice told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Wednesday that the programs that spied on Americans were not only much broader than previously acknowledged but specifically targeted journalists."
The conventional wisdom here is flat-out wrong. At least read a different view, folks!
From the FA, his job was to 'weed out' people. So he went to the folks gathering the intel and said "Ok, I'll need the stuff on persons X, Y, and Z next week. I just want to make sure you guys will cover that.". Response: "Oh sure. We're gathering everything on everyone".
(Obviously paraphrased for brevity)
So, despite being a "low-level" analyst, his story is at least plausible.
Didn't Naomi Wolf, author of The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot say that she had significant evidence that she was being bugged and her mail being intercepted? I distinctly recall hearing her say this at the Revolution March in DC on July 12, 2008.
I think I got it on video--I'll have to find the video tonight and put it on YouTube.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Well, sorry, but the site you quote is simply untrustworthy, and the site IT quotes is even less so. Anyone who quotes either of those sites loses all credibility, much as you would by quoting the Weekly World News as a source for science journalism. The fact that you quote totally screwball websites is relevant information that readers need to know to evaluate your assertions fairly.
Professor Herman started with his desired conclusions, found evidence to back them up, and discounted anything that didn't. Please see the traitor's page on wikipedia for a list of people debunking your revisionist history. The thing is, even if McCarthy's accusations were true, so what? It is legal to be a communist in a free country.
So, if you live in Canada, how exactly did you work with Tice, hmmm? I simply don't trust you and I believe you have ulterior motives.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Why would it be a good idea to go to a partisan journalist? If you're going to blow the whistle on something and you want to be taken seriously, then doesn't it make sense to take it to a journalist who is generally respected regardless of one's political leanings?
No, it doesn't make sense.
Think about it. Given the nature of these crimes, which most sane people were already pretty certain were going on, if one's political leanings are in support of the Bush administration, then they're either a fool, or a traitor. So a journalist that they would respect is clearly an extreme partisan hack. As more and more facts like this have continued to come out, it just demonstrates that Olberman and the like aren't actually partisan, they are both correct and relatively neutral.
Wanting Bush and his administration hung for treason is a completely neutral and unbiased position. Trying to play assinine games with "balance' and pretending that supporting criminal treason and standing against it are just opposite sides of neutrality is utter insanity.
That is the clear problem with your position. You don't even seem to understand what bias, partisanship, or neutrality even are.
Ha! The ones in Gitmo are the LUCKY ones. The mighty US of A has been sending prisoners caught abroad to foreign governments for "questioning", thus skirting our laws. Torture banned? No problem, send them to Egypt!
It's just like spying on American citizens. Want to spy on an American without approval? Ask our foreign allies to conduct the surveillance. And we return the favor, especially with Britain.
Keep Gitmo, but make it official US soil. Either charge and Prosecute the POWs in a REASONABLE time frame, or let them go.
If you need 5 years to collect "evidence" that a POW did something wrong, then on what grounds did you capture them in the first place?
You appear to be conflating conservative with Republican, but the two are not interchangeable, particularly with respect to the administration that just left office. There are plenty of conservatives that took issue with the warrantless wiretapping because it represented exactly the sort of governmental encroachment into private life that their ideology opposes.
Liar much? Your history is there for all to see.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Not for the fun of it, but to evade the rule of US law.
Also, I am not aware of any snap judgments (other than that bullshit TARP bill) made by the Bush Admin. Would you enlighten me??
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers." Hayek
I dunno about that I read /. for years before I got a UID just to look up cool stuff that I couldn't find elsewhere. So someone with a high number might have been around longer than you think.
If the number is less than 10,000 I even tend to pay attention to that.
I'm disappointed, I wanted cartoons! If anybody else was disappointed at the lack of cartoons in that link, enjoy:
A Farewell salute
The raw, gritty, and absolutely true story of a computer operating system's mascot who overcame unimaginable hardship and went on to become an unparallelled success (maybe he went back to that job he had in that cartoon that no one reads)
You can't trust science
Sparky buys a house (Tomorrow is prescient)
Alan Greenspan (Yikes! Tom Tomorrow has balls of crystal!)
A handy guide to the (2007) housing market
And since this is a nerd site: Barack Obama and the Invasion of Time (not a Tomorrow doodle)
Free Martian Whores!
The conservatives you mention. By your definition they haven't had anyone to vote for in the last 100 years or so.
Seriously, if you're a conservative of that stripe...who do you vote for?
And another thing. Conservatives such as the people you describe need to *SPEAK UP* and get represented. Although I usually vote Democrat, I would happily consider people of that mind set. Anything that marginalizes the neocons is good, IMHO.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I allege that water remains liquid regardless of temperature. I dare you to find a way to prove my allegation false.
Tice's claim is that organizations identified for exclusions were actually being targeted for full collection...
In the countdown interview Tice describes his job as identifying groups via metatdata so they can more accurately be excluded from full collection of communications content.
Tice says he learned: for the groups he was analyzing (such as journalists, etc), all communication content was being collected rather than excluded, which is illegal.
He also expressed his understanding that the NSA doesn't have the capacity to save all data for all communications. When he learned that they were saving full data for the groups he identified for exclusion, he said "it didn't make sense". His conclusion was that they must be using his work to specifically target those groups rather than to exclude them.
Thanks to Miro, I have the full show. The interview starts around minute 28 of "MSNBC - Countdown". He invited him back for todays show as well.
That is textbook crackpot Austrian school economics, right there. You are just making assertions without proof, in fact, I have proof that your assertions are wrong: here's a graph of us GDP, 1920-1940. You ca plainly see the New Deal was working, and then in 1937 when FDR backed off the New Deal plans, the economy started to tank again. So sorry that reality doesn't support your loony, self serving economic theories.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Commies (and yes, I use that term intentionally) were just less creative about how they committed mass murder... the skipped the whole elaborate Xyklon-off-the-trains scenario, and went straight to firing squads and starvation.
You *are* aware that Communism, the political idealogy, != Stalinism/totalitarianism, right? I mean, I get that you Americans have been brainwashed over the last 50 years to believe that communism precisely equates to the Russian purges, but... have you not yet learned that that's not *actually* true?
I mean, I fully concede that Communism, as it's been implemented on a large scale in recent human history, has devolved to totalitarianism, but that doesn't mean the two are equal. Or are you telling me that your average hutterite colony is a hotbed of genocidal killings that we're just not aware of?