Whistleblower Levels Shocking Allegations at Bush's Spying Programs
Belief:
Nobel Laureate Slams the Bible, Calls It "A Catalogue of Cruelties"
Mario de Queiroz
Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace:
As Foreclosure Nightmares Increase, Will More Homeowners Pay Off Their Bankers in Violence?
Scott Thill
DrugReporter:
Lies About Marijuana Drive People to a Much More Harmful Drug -- Booze
Steve Fox
Environment:
Why the End May Be Coming for Coal
Christine MacDonald
Food:
Despite Censorship By Beef Magnate, Michael Pollan Spreads Message About the Real Price of Cheap Food
Health and Wellness:
New York May Stop Heartless Health Insurers from Dropping Coverage When It Stops Being Profitable
William Ehart
Immigration:
NYC Marathon Raises Question of Who Is American Enough?
James E. Johnson, Jr.
Media and Technology:
Study Claims Even the Most Sophisticated Readers Can Be Manipulated
Melinda Burns
Movie Mix:
The Yes Men: Pranksters Out to Fix the World
Mark Engler
Politics:
What Michelle and Barack's Marriage Has in Common with 56 Million Other Ones
Annabelle Gurwitch
Reproductive Justice and Gender:
Fetus-Shaped Potatoes? Going Undercover Inside the Weird World of Right-Wing Abortion Foes
Ann Neumann
Rights and Liberties:
"My Kids Want to Hide Their Identity; They're Scared Someone Will Attack Us": U.S. Muslims Being Targeted
Jaisal Noor
Sex and Relationships:
Instant Sex: Has the Digital Age Destroyed Relationships or Made Them Better?
Vanessa Richmond
Take Action:
G-20 Meetings: Nothing Much Happened in the Suites, and There Was Too Much Punch in the Streets
Laura Flanders
Water:
Why Natural Gas Is Not a Clean Energy Panacea
Stan Cox
World:
With Unemployment at 40 Percent, Afghan Teens Enlist in Army, Police
Lal Aqa Sherin
On Jan. 21, former U.S. intelligence official Russell Tice appeared on MSNBC's "Countdown with Keith Olbermannn" and broke a sobering bit of news that, sandwiched between Obama's inauguration and sweeping executive orders, went largely ignored by the media: Under the Bush administration's notorious warrantless spying program, not only did the NSA eavesdrop on millions of Americans, it turns out it specifically targeted "U.S. news organizations, reporters and journalists."
As Olbermannn put it, "non-terrorist Americans, if you will."
"It has taken less than 24 hours after the Bush presidency ended for a former analyst with the National Security Agency to come forward to reveal new allegations about how this nation was spied on by its by its own government," Olbermannn said on Wednesday night.
"Russell Tice has already stood up for truth before this evening as one source for the revelation in 2005 by the New York Times that President Bush was eavesdropping on American citizens without warrants … tonight, the next chapter for Mr. Tice -- a chapter he feared to reveal while George Bush occupied the Oval Office."
The contents of the exclusive interview, if not surprising, were chilling nonetheless. Tice, who was fired from the NSA in May 2005, discussed how part of his job had been to monitor information flow among organizations that were expressly not of interest, for the ostensible purpose of flagging and filtering them out.
"… In the world that I was in," he said, "(so) as to not harpoon the wrong people … we looked at organizations, supposedly, so that we would not target them. So that we knew where they were so as not to have a problem with them." But, "what I was finding out, though, is that collection on those organizations was 24/7, you know, 365 days a year -- and it made no sense."
Turns out it was a bait and switch, in Olbermann's words, in which the "discard" pile was actually the "save" pile.
Word of the interview made its way around the blogosphere. Emptywheel's Marcy Wheeler immediately spelled out some of the implications. "First, Tice's description of the program confirms everything we have surmised about the program," she wrote.
The program:
That is, the Bush administration used meta-data (things, like length of phone call, that have nothing to do with terrorism) to pick which communications to actually open and read, and then they opened and read them.
And of course, everyone's communications -- everyone's -- were included in the totality of communications that might be tapped.
Despite the fact that the NSA scandal has been one of the biggest stories of the past few years, the story made no headlines the next day, including no mention in the New York Times, which broke the spying story to begin with (albeit one year after it first caught wind of it). In a week that saw orders from the new Obama White House to close Guantanamo and end the policy of torture, perhaps it is not surprising that this interview did not make headlines -- and indeed, as Wheeler pointed out, the news here is merely a confirmation of what others have long assumed.
But the implications bear repeating: Tice said, despite the Bush administration's claims to the contrary, "the National Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications, faxes, phone calls and their computer communications … and it didn't mater whether you were in Kansas in the middle of the country and you never made any … foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications."
Granted, not all the information was processed by human hands. Sheer volume would make that impossible. ("Americans tend to be a chatty group," said Tice.) And while Tice said he was not sure what had become of the information that was gathered, he did say that it was probably stored in a database, one that still exists today.
See more stories tagged with: keith olbermann, barack obama, george w. bush, warrantless wiretapping, national security agency, james risen, russell tice, whistleblowers, thomas tamm, eric litchblau
Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »
Support AlterNet
Do you value the information you're getting from AlterNet? Please show your support with a tax-deductible donation.
Feedback
Tell us how we're doing.