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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."
Either I am first or the NSA is really on top of things.
Why Keith Olbermann? Why not a less biased journalist? Any journalist at the Washington Post, Washington Times, etc would have been happy to get this information and run with it. Keith Olbermann's name brings with it a certain amount of partisan baggage.
The taps that were set up for the NSA were at the backbones, where they had access to all communications, incoming and outgoing. Since it is impossible, even for the NSA, to know with 100% certainty who was at the end of each communication, they would have had to collect everything, as well as store everything. At that point, it is irrelevant what they said they did with the mountains of data they collected.
Finally, it is also impossible to create a classification system that just happens to ignore american citizens during its training/creation phase. Again, it means that it is guaranteed that the NSA would be able to classify the groups involved in the communication. And again, it is irrelevant that the NSA said "Trust us, we're ignoring all of that."
The only real news is that the NSA didn't even internally pretend that they were only interested in communications with or between foreign agents. Everything else has been predicted the instant it became apparent that wiretaps were being done without oversight.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The person bush & co appointed to department of justice screened fifty applicants and more for their political views. people who told even positive stuff towards gay rights, abortion, any liberal issues even on the internet were screened with the help of a 'special software'.
dont believe me ? well, the woman confessed to all this and more in front of senate committee investigating the issue. 'i have made a mistake' she said. mistake, fifty times.
it would be utterly stupid for any person with a brain cell to believe that an administration which is capable of doing that would not exploit wiretapping for their own political purposes.
Read radical news here
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?
"Some people just want to believe this stuff so much they'll grasp at any old straw that agrees with their narrow view of the government."
That might apply to you as well. You don't think its possible that the government might spy on journalists? It's been proven to have happened with at least one administration (Nixon) in my lifetime.
There's an email from a old friend I accidentally deleted. Maybe I could get a copy from the NSA?
You kids were born too late to remember McCarthy, and Hoover's FBI, apparently.
That's why it is news. Sadly, every generation seems to need to learn first hand that the government that says "trust us and don't ask questions" can't be trusted and should be questioned.
Blank until
Political cartoonist Tom Tomorrow reminds us about
I'd forgotten about that incident.
The Bush administration has its own list of scandals, of course. But just as significant a scandal may be the way that our so-called media hid from its audience the true scope of government wrongdoing. Recall that the New York Times sat on the NSA wiretapping scandal for a year before it thought it was time to let us citizens know. If it turns out that the industry that was supposed to be keeping the public informed about things like violations of the Constitution by top elected officials was deliberately concealing that information, it may be time to reconsider whether we have a press in America that's worthy of the name, and what we can do about it.
Anyway, Tom Tomorrow asks what other revelations about the Bush administration are likely to follow. Anyone have any ideas?
Of all the biases exhibited here at Slashdot---and there are many!---the bias favoring low-id users is probably the most idiotic.
And, under the current law and the August 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review ruling, it is explicitly legal.
The FISA Amendments Act of 2008, passed by a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress, allows for foreign intelligence collection on non-US Persons without a warrant, no matter where the collection occurs. The longstanding Smith v. Maryland, 442 US 735 (1979), allows for the collection of communications metadata, i.e., "to" and "from" information, without a warrant. The FISC ruling explicitly finds legal such collection under the now-sunset Protect America Act and, thus, the current FISA Amendments Act of 2008.
In order to determine which traffic content may be collected for foreign intelligence purposes, the traffic metadata must be examined. Even when a target in question is a specific non-US Person of foreign intelligence interest, traffic metadata must first be examined in order to target that person! Because examining traffic metadata was found explicitly legal and Constitutional three decades ago by the United States Supreme Court, doing so in order to target legitimate foreign intelligence collection is allowable under the law.
The major issues for foreign SIGINT were twofold:
- A lot of traffic is now digital versus analog, and cannot be targeted by aiming a directional antenna at a particular geographic locale. It is now traveling largely via things like fiber optic cables, intermixed with all manner of other communications. In order to target the collection, it is no longer a case of sitting on a Navy vessel offshore from some area of interest between individuals talking on two-way radios; it's finding that traffic in a sea of global digital communications.
- Foreign communications of non-US Persons physically outside of the US was increasingly traveling through the US. Previously fair game for foreign intelligence collection throughout the history of such collection in the United States, it suddenly became off-limits without a warrant because it was incidentally routed through locations in the United States. Foreign intelligence collection on non-US Persons outside of the US does not require a warrant, and fundamentally still shouldn't simply because their traffic happens to enter the US.
This was a case of changing technology necessitating an update to a law. A supermajority of both houses of Congress agreed.
Unfortunately, this discussion is so mired in politics, personal grinding of axes, confusion about early NSA programs (like the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program, or TSP, which was not renewed after January 2007), and isolated examples of legitimate abuse or misconduct, that not many seem interested in having any real discussion about how foreign intelligence can be reasonably conducted in the digital age. Instead it is a sea of frantic arm-waving and breathless blogging about how the Constitution is being shredded, when the mechanisms of law and judicial oversight have explicitly established the activities as legal.
Ironically, Tice's interview is spot-on. He says, "What was done was sort of an ability to look at the metadata ... and ferret that information to determine what communications would ultimately be collected," and adds, "we looked at organizations, just supposedly so that we would not target them."
"Supposedly?"
That's the whole point. So here's an example of someone explaining more or less what is happening, namely, that traffic metadata is examined to determine whether or not it constitutes a foreign intelligence target, and that measures were undertaken to not intercept the content of communications of entities which are not legitima
That says it all. If Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly can't believe him, then who else in their right mind would.
I believe, sir, that you have an extraneous "else" in line 1.
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
No, they didn't actually read every e-mail. They didn't even read a significant fraction of them. But, they did categorize every one by who sent them and who received them and then archived them for future use. That's the part that should scare everyone. Even if you happen to like/trust the current administration (or happened to like/trust the previous one), you and your descendents are going to live through many more presidencies. The legal red-tape that people like Bush & Cheney worked to eliminate wasn't, necessarily, meant to stop them it was meant to stop the true monster that will, inevitably, get into office someday. It's almost a guarantee that, some day, someone on the order of Hitler will sneak his/her way into office (Note: This isn't a Godwin as I'm not trying to suggest that Bush & Co. are like Hitler themselves.). When that happens, those limitations on government power are the only thing that has a chance of stopping them. The more we water them down, the more we guarantee his/her future success at destroying this country.
Even in the short term, this kind of illegal invasion of privacy can, easily, lead to lots of people being hurt. Just look at the improper/illegal attorney firing in the Department of Justice under the Bush administration. They went through and fired anyone they thought had connections with political/social views they didn't like. People lost their source of income and the government became much more politically polarized. The kind of info archived by a program like what this guy is suggesting could be used to make similar, illegal/improper, witch-hunt much more "efficient".
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#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
Wow, in addition to being an atheist Muslim Canadian Joseph McCarthy loving stock analyst who uses SPICE in his circuit design work you're also a mid-to-high ranking spook at the NSA? And yet you still find time to post about it all on /.?
Amazing. Simply amazing. If true.
--MarkusQ
Does it really matter if people were "commies"?
Its just a political ideology, and just like the rest of them, it has good points and bad points. Discriminating, or ruining peoples lives in this case, against people because you don't personally like their opinion is wrong. This man based his whole life and reputation on this, therefore I would say it okay to "diss" him.
Most of these people weren't "anti-American", they just had a different view of how the government should act, and possibly (justifiably) found the cold war a silly, destructive, thing.
Hell, being anti-American isn't even a crime, much less being communist, or socialist. What the hell does "anti-American" even mean, really? I hated Bush, his policies, his wars, his abuse of the constitution; does that make me anti-American? I really dislike much of our culture; does this make me anti-American? I'm a social libertarian; does that? I'm not a fan of our economic philosophies and our view that they are superior to everyone else's (or worse, that their sinonymous with democracy or freedom); am I anti-American?
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Of all the biases exhibited here at Slashdot---and there are many!---the bias favoring low-id users is probably the most idiotic.
Sorry, but we only consider critiques from users numbered below 636672.
Would the parent have been modded troll if he made the same observation about going on Bill O'Reilly? To a lot of us, Olbermann is in the same league as him (he just chooses different topics to manufacture outrage over) and it's pretty hard to take him seriously.
And regardless of what you think of him do try and remember this: Olbermann is not a reporter. He's a commentator. It seems to me like a lot of people have forgotten the difference between the two.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
You kids were born too late to remember McCarthy, and Hoover's FBI, apparently.
So how old are you, grandpa? I'm closing in on my sixth decade, but McCarthy happened when I was a toddler. Hoover's FBI was never reported until Hoover was already burning in hell.
You might have mentioned "I am not a crook" Nixon, I voted for that asshole. he had an "enemies" list (much like many slashdotters), and that list included many journalists.
Free Martian Whores!
I'd argue the problem he is trying to fix is the loss of our credibility (aside from the moral issues) from claiming to be for human rights (and against torture), but practicing torture...
tl;dr The problem is we are doing torture. How is it 'fixing a symptom' to close the places where torture is allowed to happen?
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Disgruntled ex-employee makes accusations with zero evidence. News at 11 I guess.
This guy was just an analyst, not some super high ranking official. The type of data he was privy too was low level and generic.
You have no clue what an analyst is, do you?
High ranking officials often make it a point to *NOT* know, or be informed of, things that may jeopardize themselves politically and legally. Analysts on the other hand, are the people who ACTUALLY DO the Top Secret work the public never hears about.... unless an analyst blows the whistle on illegal, immoral, unconstitutional acts ordered by (in this case) Bush and Cheney.
Read a book or something....sheesh.
I am open source, and Linux baby!
Oh wow, how illogical of me to assume there's an implication in calling someone a cretinous imbecile that they shouldn't be listened to. Thank you, now I'm clear on the disntinction, you cretinous imbecile.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
I won't agree that it's nice that they record all my calls, emails, and movements. Their job isn't to be nice. Theirs, for the most part, is to gather intelligence. By monitoring journalists, that would put an extra 50,000 eyes and ears out there
Nice theory. The only thing you forgot to mention, is that it's ILLEGAL for them to monitor communications starting and terminating in the US. I really don't care if it makes their job easier, or gets them more intelligence...it's ILLEGAL. They've been doing this all along, while saying they weren't. Bush, Cheney, Gonzales and Rumsfeld deliberately ignored the law and instructed NSA to do the same. The communications companies (with one exception) happily assisted in the process.
You know, we have a Bill of Rights and a Constitution in this country, and we are all supposed to live by the rule of law. No one is above the law. *That's* why this is an issue.
What, like more than the +4,000 troops we've lost in the two wars we started and the +38,000 crippled/paraplegics?
How could it possibly result in more lives lost than those missteps? Please, fill me in on how closing Gitmo is going to do that and cost us more than $600 billion dollars.
Are we going to lose more lives than building strong alliances with other countries that help us gather intel against terrorists?
Seriously, though. If our strategy is to destroy Al Qaeda and other terror networks, then we should have kept our eye on the ball. Secure Afghanistan. Stabilize Pakistan and drive Al Qaeda and the Taliban out of the tribal regions like Waziristan.
Don't give me this at-all-costs bullshit about closing Gitmo. Of course it might cause some deaths--in the same way that giving people a fair trial might lead to some deaths because criminals will sometimes go free to commit more crimes.
Does it really matter if people were "commies"?
Its just a political ideology, and just like the rest of them, it has good points and bad points. Discriminating, or ruining peoples lives in this case, against people because you don't personally like their opinion is wrong.
Communism, at the time, was equated with Nazism. The US government, driven by hysteria on the part of a few blowhards whose sole purpose is to win re-election by sowing fear (gee, that sounds familiar) worked to make belief in any political ideology short of "Democracy" (we have never had that on a national level in the United States) illegal. As a member of a union I was forced to join (by nature of my work) I had to, in the 1990s sign a paper indicating that I was not a member of the Communist Party or any organization allied with Communism. Everyone who joins a union today still has to sign such a statement.
Frankly, when I signed that statement, I realized it was a direct violation of my rights as a citizen to associate with whom I wish and to believe in what I prefer to believe in.
As a part of our "campaign against godless Communism," Congress even went as far as to have a new motto imprinted on all of our money: "In God We Trust" and they also changed the Pledge of Allegiance to include under God after "One nation" and before "Indivisible."
These latter measures, designed to oppose Communism, have been "reinterpreted" by part of he political spectrum as proof that the United States is a "Christian nation" which I understand means "theocracy."
But it did matter if people were "commies." They lost their jobs and were forced to find other work, usually for a lot less pay. The blacklist didn't end until the 1960s and was a list of people "convicted" mostly on hearsay evidence with no trial.
The creepy thing about Bush is that he was using the same techniques Nixon used against journalists and others perceived to be "enemies." Everyone knows today that Nixon was extremely paranoid. I don't think Bush is paranoid like Nixon, he is just mean, like his mother.
And, with the President of the United States allowed to incarcerate anyone who he declares to be an "enemy combatant," your hatred of Bush, his policies, wars and Constitutional abuse makes you not anti-American as much as an "enemy combatant."
And I use that term, based on the Bush Administration's definition of "returned to the battlefield" applied to released inmates of Gitmo: Anyone who wrote an article or whose lawyer wrote an article or spoke out to describe their captivity was considered having "returned to the battlefield." So, I am assuming you spoke out about your dislike of the past administration.
How does it feel to be an "enemy combatant?"
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
It has always been an utter failure ...
See, that's where you're wrong. It was a huge success in this case. They got hordes of intelligence on the domestic activities of U.S. citizens, without any need for public documentation or warrants, and nobody has gone to jail for it. In fact, the telecoms were granted blanket immunity from prosecution after the fact. Sure, they couldn't keep it up forever, but that was never the goal to begin with.
No, I wasn't commenting on the intelligence-gathering or domestic spying itself. I was commenting on what that ultimately leads to. This kind of surveillance (only the technology with which it is done has changed) and lack of respect for the citizens has always been a core component of totalitarian dictatorships throughout history. I consider the widespread misery and suffering that all such dictatorships embody to be the "utter failure" and it's not like we don't have enough historical examples to know what the early stages look like.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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?