NSA Spying Program Bigger Than Chimpy Said

[Nickdfresh]

NSA spy program broader than Bush admitted
‘Pattern analysis’ performed on main U.S. telecommunication channels

Updated: 2:41 a.m. ET Dec. 24, 2005

NEW YORK - The volume of information gathered from telephone and Internet communications by the National Security Agency without court-approved warrants was much larger than the White House has acknowledged, The New York Times reported Saturday.

Citing current and former government officials, the Times said the information was collected by tapping directly into some of the U.S. telecommunication system’s main arteries. The officials said the NSA won the cooperation of telecommunications companies to obtain access to both domestic and international communications without first gaining warrants.

A former telecommunications technology manager told the Times that industry leaders have been storing information on calling patterns and giving it to the federal government to aid in tracking possible terrorists since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Searching for patterns
Government and industry officials with knowledge of the program told the newspaper the NSA sought to analyze communications patterns to gather clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, as well as the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages.

Calls to and from Afghanistan were of particular interest to the NSA, the Times said. This so-called “pattern analysis� on calls within the United States would often otherwise require a warrant if the government wanted to trace who calls whom.

President Bush and his aides have said his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to monitoring international phone and e-mail communications linked to people with connections to al-Qaida. What has not been acknowledged, according to the Times, is that NSA technicians combed large amounts of phone and Internet traffic seeking patterns pointing to terrorism suspects.

Feds sought access to telecom gateways
Some officials described the program as a large data mining operation, the Times said, and described it as much larger than the White House has acknowledged.

Several officials said senior government officials went to the nation’s big telecommunications companies to get access to switches that act as gateways between U.S. and international communications.

Many calls going from one foreign country to another are routed through U.S. switches and a communications expert who once worked at the NSA said in recent years government officials have been encouraging the telecommunications industry to bring more international traffic through U.S.-based switches.

The officials who spoke to the newspaper requested anonymity because the program’s details remain classified. Bush administration officials declined to comment on the operation’s technical details, the Times said.

Copyright 2005 Reuters (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10592932/#storyContinued) Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.

[Hardrock69]

I hope Chimpy is enjoying his last Christmas in office...
:cool:

[Hardrock69]

December 22, 2005
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Former NSA Intelligence Analyst & Action Officer Urges to be Heard by Congress Regarding Unlawful Conduct by NSA

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT

News from the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC):

[Emphasis by BuzzFlash]

Russ Tice, former National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence analyst and action officer, has sent the following two letters to the chairs of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. Mr. Tice intends to report to Congress probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts conducted while he was an intelligence officer with the National Security Agency (NSA) and with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). These acts involved the Director of the National Security Agency, the Deputies Chief of Staff for Air and Space Operations, and the U.S. Secretary of Defense, and were conducted via very highly sensitive intelligence programs and operations known as Special Access Programs (SAP). SAP programs and operations are more commonly referred to as “black world” programs and operations. Mr. Tice was a technical intelligence specialist dealing almost exclusively with SAP programs and operations at both NSA and DIA.

Mr. Tice stated: “As a Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) officer it is continually drilled into us that the very first law chiseled in the SIGINT equivalent of the Ten Commandments (USSID-18) is that Thou shall not spy on American persons without a court order from FISA. This law is continually drilled into each NSA intelligence officer throughout his or her career. The very people that lead the National Security Agency have violated this holy edict of SIGINT." A pivotal question in this case is whether Americans were being spied on via a vacuum cleaner approach wherein vast amounts of information are sucked in. FISA warrants require a name of the target and would not cover such a mass approach. He also added: “In addition to knowing this fundamental commandment of not violating the civil rights of Americans, intelligence officers are required to take an oath to protect the United States Constitution from enemies both foreign and domestic. It is with my oath as a US intelligence officer weighing heavy on my mind that I wish to report to congress acts that I believe are unlawful and unconstitutional. The freedom of the American people cannot be protected when our constitutional liberties are ignored and our nation has decayed into a police state.”

"These actions by the current administration are a compulsion to secrecy, an expansive view of presidential authority, and reluctance to answer to the people and Congress. Woodrow Wilson, himself no novice concerning secrecy, claimed that it is a 'fair presumption that secrecy means impropriety'. That is a presumption that we have been called upon to suspend in the name of national security, but with recent disclosures that suspended judgment appears to have been unwise. We urge the congress to hold hearings and let patriotic witnesses like Russ Tice testify,” stated Sibel Edmonds, the director of National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC).

Michael Ostrolenk, National Director of the Liberty Coalition agrees with Mrs. Edmonds and stated further “I am glad to know that Mr. Tice takes his oath to the Constitution seriously. He obviously knows that his obligation is not to this or any Administration but to our Republican form of government with its proper checks and balances and to protect the rights it was instituted to secure.” He continued “This is less about a particular Administration and more about the natural tendency for government to become destructive to the very ends it was created to fulfill. I hope that Congress takes it oversight responsibilities seriously and investigates Mr. Tice’s allegations in an open and non-partisan manner.”

Here is the letter by Mr. Tice, sent on Dec 18, 2005, to the Senate & House Intelligence Committee:

* * *

Dear Chairman Roberts,

Under the provisions of the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA), I intend to report to Congress probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts conducted while I was an intelligence officer with the National Security Agency (NSA) and with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). These acts involve the Director of the National Security Agency, the Deputies Chief of Staff for Air and Space Operations, and the U.S. Secretary of Defense.

These probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts were conducted via very highly sensitive intelligence programs and operations known as Special Access Programs (SAP)s. I was a technical intelligence specialist dealing almost exclusively with SAP programs and operations at both NSA and DIA.

Due to the highly sensitive nature of these programs and operations, I will require assurances from your committee that the staffers and/or congressional members to participate retain the proper security clearances, and also have the appropriate SAP cleared facilities available for these discussions.

Please inform me when you require my appearance on Capitol Hill to conduct these discussions in relation to this ICWPA report.

Very Respectfully,


Russell D. Tice
Former Intelligence Officer, NSA

* * *

Tice, Russ; Former Intelligence Analyst & Action Officer, Air Force, Naval Intelligence, DIA and NSA
Russ Tice worked technical intelligence issues as an all-source analyst, systems instructor, special programs expert, technical missions operations action officer, tasking agent, field intelligence on-site analyst and liaison, and advanced capabilities officer. Known as a stickler for technical detailed analysis and “by the book” on security regs. After returning from a temporary overseas assignment in 2001, he observed that a DIA coworker exhibited the classic signs of involvement in espionage. After quietly reporting this, his suspicion was quickly dismissed by DIA’s counterintelligence (CI) office. He continued to observe activity to suggest there was a problem and reported such. He returned to the National Security Agency and, busy with the Iraqi War, dropped the issue. When noting a report that FBI CI agents availed secrets to a China source for sex, he questioned the

[Hardrock69]

December 22, 2005

Former NSA Intelligence Analyst & Action Officer Urges to be Heard by Congress Regarding Unlawful Conduct by NSA

News from the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC):

Russ Tice, former National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence analyst and action officer, has sent the following two letters to the chairs of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. Mr. Tice intends to report to Congress probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts conducted while he was an intelligence officer with the National Security Agency (NSA) and with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). These acts involved the Director of the National Security Agency, the Deputies Chief of Staff for Air and Space Operations, and the U.S. Secretary of Defense, and were conducted via very highly sensitive intelligence programs and operations known as Special Access Programs (SAP). SAP programs and operations are more commonly referred to as “black world” programs and operations. Mr. Tice was a technical intelligence specialist dealing almost exclusively with SAP programs and operations at both NSA and DIA.

Mr. Tice stated: “As a Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) officer it is continually drilled into us that the very first law chiseled in the SIGINT equivalent of the Ten Commandments (USSID-18) is that Thou shall not spy on American persons without a court order from FISA. This law is continually drilled into each NSA intelligence officer throughout his or her career. The very people that lead the National Security Agency have violated this holy edict of SIGINT." A pivotal question in this case is whether Americans were being spied on via a vacuum cleaner approach wherein vast amounts of information are sucked in. FISA warrants require a name of the target and would not cover such a mass approach. He also added: “In addition to knowing this fundamental commandment of not violating the civil rights of Americans, intelligence officers are required to take an oath to protect the United States Constitution from enemies both foreign and domestic. It is with my oath as a US intelligence officer weighing heavy on my mind that I wish to report to congress acts that I believe are unlawful and unconstitutional. The freedom of the American people cannot be protected when our constitutional liberties are ignored and our nation has decayed into a police state.”

"These actions by the current administration are a compulsion to secrecy, an expansive view of presidential authority, and reluctance to answer to the people and Congress. Woodrow Wilson, himself no novice concerning secrecy, claimed that it is a 'fair presumption that secrecy means impropriety'. That is a presumption that we have been called upon to suspend in the name of national security, but with recent disclosures that suspended judgment appears to have been unwise. We urge the congress to hold hearings and let patriotic witnesses like Russ Tice testify,” stated Sibel Edmonds, the director of National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC).

Michael Ostrolenk, National Director of the Liberty Coalition agrees with Mrs. Edmonds and stated further “I am glad to know that Mr. Tice takes his oath to the Constitution seriously. He obviously knows that his obligation is not to this or any Administration but to our Republican form of government with its proper checks and balances and to protect the rights it was instituted to secure.” He continued “This is less about a particular Administration and more about the natural tendency for government to become destructive to the very ends it was created to fulfill. I hope that Congress takes it oversight responsibilities seriously and investigates Mr. Tice’s allegations in an open and non-partisan manner.”

Here is the letter by Mr. Tice, sent on Dec 18, 2005, to the Senate & House Intelligence Committee:

* * *

Dear Chairman Roberts,

Under the provisions of the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA), I intend to report to Congress probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts conducted while I was an intelligence officer with the National Security Agency (NSA) and with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). These acts involve the Director of the National Security Agency, the Deputies Chief of Staff for Air and Space Operations, and the U.S. Secretary of Defense.

These probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts were conducted via very highly sensitive intelligence programs and operations known as Special Access Programs (SAP)s. I was a technical intelligence specialist dealing almost exclusively with SAP programs and operations at both NSA and DIA.

Due to the highly sensitive nature of these programs and operations, I will require assurances from your committee that the staffers and/or congressional members to participate retain the proper security clearances, and also have the appropriate SAP cleared facilities available for these discussions.

Please inform me when you require my appearance on Capitol Hill to conduct these discussions in relation to this ICWPA report.

Very Respectfully,


Russell D. Tice
Former Intelligence Officer, NSA

* * *

Tice, Russ; Former Intelligence Analyst & Action Officer, Air Force, Naval Intelligence, DIA and NSA
Russ Tice worked technical intelligence issues as an all-source analyst, systems instructor, special programs expert, technical missions operations action officer, tasking agent, field intelligence on-site analyst and liaison, and advanced capabilities officer. Known as a stickler for technical detailed analysis and “by the book” on security regs. After returning from a temporary overseas assignment in 2001, he observed that a DIA coworker exhibited the classic signs of involvement in espionage. After quietly reporting this, his suspicion was quickly dismissed by DIA’s counterintelligence (CI) office. He continued to observe activity to suggest there was a problem and reported such. He returned to the National Security Agency and, busy with the Iraqi War, dropped the issue. When noting a report that FBI CI agents availed secrets to a China source for sex, he questioned the FBI’s competence. NSA retaliated by having him declared crazy, revoking his security clearance, and terminating his employment in May 2005.

About National Security Whistleblowers Coalition
National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC), founded in August 2004, is an independent and nonpartisan alliance of whistleblowers who have come forward to address our nation’s security weaknesses; to inform authorities of security vulnerabilities in our intelligence agencies, at nuclear power plants and weapon facilities, in airports, and at our nation’s borders and ports; to uncover government waste, fraud, abuse, and in some cases criminal conduct. The NSWBC is dedicated to aiding national security whistleblowers through a variety of methods, including advocacy of governmental and legal reform, educating the public concerning whistleblowing activity, provision of comfort and fellowship to national security whistleblowers suffering retaliation and other harms, and working with other public interest organizations to affect goals defined in the NSWBC mission statement. For more on NSWBC visit www.nswbc.org

[Hardrock69]

Norman Solomon: NSA Spied on U.N. Diplomats in Push for Invasion of Iraq



By Norman Solomon
Tue Dec 27,11:39 AM ET

Despite all the news accounts and punditry since the New York Times published its Dec. 16 bombshell about the National Security Agency’s domestic spying, the media coverage has made virtually no mention of the fact that the Bush administration used the NSA to spy on U.N. diplomats in New York before the invasion of
Iraq.


That spying had nothing to do with protecting the United States from a terrorist attack. The entire purpose of the NSA surveillance was to help the White House gain leverage, by whatever means possible, for a resolution in the
U.N. Security Council to green light an invasion. When that surveillance was exposed nearly three years ago, the mainstream U.S. media winked at Bush’s illegal use of the NSA for his Iraq invasion agenda.

Back then, after news of the NSA’s targeted spying at the
United Nations broke in the British press, major U.S. media outlets gave it only perfunctory coverage -- or, in the case of the New York Times, no coverage at all. Now, while the NSA is in the news spotlight with plenty of retrospective facts, the NSA’s spying at the U.N. goes unmentioned: buried in an Orwellian memory hole.

A rare exception was a paragraph in a Dec. 20 piece by Patrick Radden Keefe in the online magazine Slate -- which pointedly noted that “the eavesdropping took place in Manhattan and violated the General Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, the Headquarters Agreement for the United Nations, and the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, all of which the United States has signed.”

But after dodging the story of the NSA’s spying at the U.N. when it mattered most -- before the invasion of Iraq -- the New York Times and other major news organizations are hardly apt to examine it now. That’s all the more reason for other media outlets to step into the breach.

In early March 2003, journalists at the London-based Observer reported that the NSA was secretly participating in the U.S. government’s high-pressure campaign for the U.N. Security Council to approve a pro-war resolution. A few days after the Observer revealed the text of an NSA memo about U.S. spying on Security Council delegations, I asked Daniel Ellsberg to assess the importance of the story. “This leak,” he replied, “is more timely and potentially more important than the
Pentagon Papers.” The key word was “timely.”

Publication of the top-secret Pentagon Papers in 1971, made possible by Ellsberg’s heroic decision to leak those documents, came after the Vietnam War had been underway for many years. But with an invasion of Iraq still in the future, the leak about NSA spying on U.N. diplomats in New York could erode the Bush administration’s already slim chances of getting a war resolution through the Security Council. (Ultimately, no such resolution passed before the invasion.) And media scrutiny in the United States could have shed light on how Washington’s war push was based on subterfuge and manipulation.

“As part of its battle to win votes in favor of war against Iraq,” the Observer had reported on March 2, 2003, the U.S. government developed an “aggressive surveillance operation, which involves interception of the home and office telephones and the e-mails of U.N. delegates.” The smoking gun was “a memorandum written by a top official at the National Security Agency -- the U.S. body which intercepts communications around the world -- and circulated to both senior agents in his organization and to a friendly foreign intelligence agency.” The friendly agency was Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters.

The Observer explained: “The leaked memorandum makes clear that the target of the heightened surveillance efforts are the delegations from Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Mexico, Guinea and Pakistan at the U.N. headquarters in New York -- the so-called ‘Middle Six’ delegations whose votes are being fought over by the pro-war party, led by the U.S. and Britain, and the party arguing for more time for U.N. inspections, led by France, China and Russia.”

The NSA memo, dated Jan. 31, 2003, outlined the wide scope of the surveillance activities, seeking any information useful to push a war resolution through the Security Council -- “the whole gamut of information that could give U.S. policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals or to head off surprises.”

Noting that the Bush administration “finds itself isolated” in its zeal for war on Iraq, the Times of London called the leak of the memo an “embarrassing disclosure.” And, in early March 2003, the embarrassment was nearly worldwide. From Russia to France to Chile to Japan to Australia, the story was big mainstream news. But not in the United States.

Several days after the “embarrassing disclosure,” not a word about it had appeared in the New York Times, the USA’s supposed paper of record. “Well, it’s not that we haven’t been interested,” Times deputy foreign editor Alison Smale told me on the evening of March 5, nearly 96 hours after the Observer broke the story. But “we could get no confirmation or comment” on the memo from U.S. officials. Smale added: “We would normally expect to do our own intelligence reporting.” Whatever the rationale, the New York Times opted not to cover the story at all.

Except for a high-quality Baltimore Sun article that appeared on March 4, the coverage in major U.S. media outlets downplayed the significance of the Observer’s revelations. The Washington Post printed a 514-word article on a back page with the headline “Spying Report No Shock to U.N.” Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times published a longer piece that didn’t only depict U.S. surveillance at the United Nations as old hat; the LA Times story also reported “some experts suspected that it [the NSA memo] could be a forgery” -- and “several former top intelligence officials said they were skeptical of the memo’s authenticity.”

But within days, any doubt about the NSA memo’s “authenticity” was gone. The British press reported that the U.K. government had arrested an unnamed female employee at a British intelligence agency in connection with the leak. By then, however, the spotty coverage of the top-secret NSA memo in the mainstream U.S. press had disappeared.

As it turned out, the Observer’s expose -- headlined “Revealed: U.S. Dirty Tricks to Win Vote on Iraq War” -- came 18 days before the invasion of Iraq began.

From the day that the Observer first reported on NSA spying at the United Nations until the moment 51 weeks later when British prosecutors dropped charges against whistleblower Katharine Gun, major U.S. news outlets provided very little coverage of the story. The media avoidance continued well past the day in mid-November 2003 when Gun’s name became public as the British press reported that she been formally charged with violating the draconian Official Secrets Act.

Facing the possibility of a prison sentence, Katharine Gun said that disclosure of the NSA memo was “necessary to prevent an illegal war in which thousands of Iraqi civilians and British soldiers would be killed or maimed.” She said: “I have only ever followed my conscience.”

In contrast to the courage of the lone woman who leaked the NSA memo -- and in contrast to the journalistic vigor of the Observer team that exposed it -- the most powerful U.S. news outlets gave therevelation the media equivalent of a yawn. Top officials of the Bush administration, no doubt relieved at the lack of U.S. media concern about the NSA’s illicit spying, must have been very encouraged.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20051227/cm_huffpost/012927

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by Hardrock69
Norman Solomon: NSA Spied on U.N. Diplomats in Push for Invasion of Iraq



By Norman Solomon
Tue Dec 27,11:39 AM ET
...


Yeah, it's all about 'fighting terrorism' and security...:rolleyes:

[Warham]

It is, and don't you forget it.

;)