Oh holy crap!

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

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.

I wrote nearly a year ago:

Smart people, clever human minds sifting through a high quality trickle of data are far, far, far more likely to succeed. Who do we need working at the CIA and the NSA? A person who finds the notion of spying a little uncomfortable, who feels a bit of the moral compromise behind covert work. The exact sort of Liberal, well-educated, and principled individual who would find a warrantless wiretapping program to be abhorrent. The sort of person who wouldn’t want to work for a president supporting such a program.

I think about all the talented cryptographers, computer engineers, linguistic experts, political scientist, historians—all the sharp minds I’ve encountered in my long education—who have no place in, who would feel no welcome within an unconstrained intelligence agency. We’re less safe without their service.

Jonathan Golob is an actual doctor.

11 replies on “NSA Whistleblower: We Spied on Everyone, Particularly Journalists”

  1. Obama remains a friend of the Penguin:

    “Several developers on Novell’s Mono team leaped into action and worked late into the night so that Linux users will be able to watch the stream with Moonlight, an open source implementation of Silverlight 1.0. Their efforts, which were undertaken in collaboration with Microsoft, have ensured that the PIC stream will be accessible to Linux users who download the Moonlight browser plugin from the project’s web site, as well as to PPC Mac users who rely on Microsoft’s Silverlight 1.0 plugin.”

    http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/200…

  3. @1 has a point – you can easily upgrade the WH computers by installing the latest Linux build on them and there’s even a Secure version used by the NSA, so it’s not too hard.

    But as to you guys in the media, well, are you really that surprised?

  4. Now that GW is out we’ll probably be hearing much more about things like this, related to domestic spying, torture, rendition, lying to the public in the runup to wars… I support Scott Horton’s excellent strategy for dealing with the truth before it buries us in shame, articulated most recently in Harper’s: a South Africa-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a preface to carefully laid prosecutions.

  9. I still think that 43’s gov’t archived every telecommunication, even if Mr. Tice never found out about it. I think the mistake that was the Bush era has resulted in our immortalization, fellow citizens. The details of our private lives have been preserved like those of the peasants interrogated by the Inquisition, or the humdrum Oval Office life captured by the Starr Report. W’s Staatssicherheitsdienst has conserved my long-distance relationships for all eternity.

Comments are closed.