More Claims From NSA Whistleblower Russell Tice 271
eldavojohn writes "Russell Tice, former NSA employee & whistleblower, has revealed yet more details claiming that wiretapping was combined with credit card data to target civilians. He also suggests the CEOs of major companies hold the truth: 'To get at what's really going on here, the CEOs of these telecom companies, and also of the banking and credit card companies, and any other company where you have big databases, those are the people you have to haul in to Congress and tell them you better tell the truth.' Will Congress follow his suggestions?"
This adds to information revealed by Tice last week that the wiretaps targeted journalists in particular.
No (Score:2, Interesting)
Congress will not follow his suggestions. That would be the shocking news story.
Re:Hard evidence (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hard evidence (Score:5, Interesting)
Having worked there in the black tower at Ft Meade (and more importantly, the lower brick building with the looooong hallways that is connected to it, which is where the real work gets done), this guy is appearing to be less and less believable.
There one thing that rings the BS bell for this guy: NSA is VERY compartmentalized. Information simply does not cross boundaries there, and there are multiple checks and curbs to see that compartmentalized intelligence is not shared out, so that the sources and methods are protected. In the past, there have (allegedly) been times when people died or bad events were allowed in order to preserve sources and methods. This is RELIGION at NSA: protect sources and methods, PERIOD. That means compartmentalization really slices the world up, and you only get to see your sliver of it as an analyst.
That's one of the major frustrations I and others had there when working there as an analyst: you only get blindered, partial, or gappy info and data. Many times, the best you get are "sanitized" analyst/reporting products from other programs and compartments that has been scrubbed so clean of sources and methods that it is scarcely useful. This makes one's analysis necessarily incomplete in many case because one simply do not have the raw data on hand except that for which one's own compartment is responsible. As an analyst, you end up using hedge-words, and all kinds of "fudge factor" language.
So I doubt anyone his level or near his level (above him) has that much scope, nor has that sort of visibility into programs across such a broad swath of intelligence collection, processing, analysis and reporting. Because it would ring alarm bells in personnel security if one person of that level were to be read-on to so many special compartmented access programs, sufficent enough to be privy to so many programs, sources and methods.
Furthermore, he cites no real specifics in these cases, not a shred of *actionable* evidence, only vague and overly-broad allegations, all given in a conspiracy-tinged "dramatic" way.
He may have reported some issues correctly regarding telecom intercepts (the legality of which have been upheld, and which the Obama administration seems to find useful now that they are tasked with protecting the nation), but a lot of this seems to me to be simply speculation on his part.
The applicable USSIDs and Presidential Directives are pretty tight about these sorts of things, and the NSA Inspector General pounds people for violating these sorts of things. This is another reason Tice's claims seem hollow to an insider(aside from the utter lack of actionable specific hard evidence): he apparently never went to the IG.
Initially his claims appeared to merit attention, but all in all, Tice is beginning to sound more like a crank who wants face-time on Olberman than anyone with a legitimate, actionable claim, with evidence to back it up.
Advice from one ex-"A wing" denizen: Start naming names, places, and activities, ones that can be verified by the IG and the US Attorney General; they love to rip NSA program managers. Otherwise, Tice needs to realize he's not "Mother" and this isn't Sneakers.
Timing (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been holding my fire until Obama gets his AG pick confirmed, and the stimulus package passed. No one can expect anyone, even Obama, to change the course of justice overnight. And we do have many pressing issues that must be dealt with now.
But the Senate committee just voted to confirm Holder, and the vote on the general floor is expected to confirm him as well. And the House just passed the stimulus package by a large margin; it looks like it's on the road to passage.
So those two factors, plus the absence of a single Republican vote in support of a response to our national economic emergency, despite Obama's kowtowing to the "concerns" of Republicans, gives me hope that a proper, deep, wide, and comprehensive ass-kicking is coming from the boots of Lady Justice.
If not, then we have definitive proof that some people ARE above the law, and that the law therefore applies to no one. And it becomes the right and duty of the American people to punish their representatives accordingly.
Re:Hard evidence (Score:5, Interesting)
"Hell, Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus, but no one goes around calling him, "evil"."
You should read more blogs; lots of people think Lincoln was evil for destroying the Constitution in order to centralise power in DC.
Re:We need investigations (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem isn't this particular executive or that individual board member being corrupt. The problem is much, much larger than that. The larger any corporation is, the more wealth it controls, and the more power it has over its customers, the people it employs, and the government it lobbies, the more corruption there will be. Period. It's just human nature.
You can pass all the laws against corruption you like, try to implement all the oversight you possibly could, but as long as the corporation keeps growing in size and scope, controlling ever more areas of people's lives and controlling ever more vast sums of wealth, the problems will persist and get worse.
Every time another corporate venture is started, new department created, new tax shelter set forth, corporate corruption *will* grow along with it. It's as unavoidable as entropy.
Every time the public demands that corporations assume a new responsibility or provide a new product or service it also increases the power and wealth it controls and along with it the opportunities and incentives for corruption. The founders of our country envisioned/intended a small, relatively weak federal government with barely enough revenue & powers to accomplish only the bare necessities of a central government. Unfortunately, this allows supercorporations to run amok.
At this point in our history, corporate America has grown so large and corrupt that I believe that it is in a feedback-loop that will only be halted when the whole country collapses from the weight of the "executive class" and devolves into chaos. It won't be pleasant, likely very, very bloody with staggering numbers of deaths, and makes me glad I'm rather old as I'll hopefully be dead before the collapse happens. Although it may well be closer than I or anyone else suspects.
What possible incidents from NSA data mining?? (Score:4, Interesting)
Ok my question is can this /. community isolate or expose the methods of what the NSA has been doing, and has the NSA been feeding these data mining systems into other areas of the government or military?
Specifically you guys should look at US NORTHCOM (northern command), Homeland Security dept, and the National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency. I strongly suspect that these groups put together have fed illegally obtained data into the law enforcement apparatus (the NGA and NORTHCOM had a presence at the Republican National Convention here in Minnesota - these are military agencies!)
NGA's website talks a lot about the data feeds they create for the NORTHCOM/DHS National Incident Management System (NIMS). We could easily find that various events like raids were generated via illegal data mining... Where is the manifestation of law enforcement ACTIVITY from data mining collection??
How to approach this systematically, that is what I'm asking you folks about.
Re:Hard evidence (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't work with this particular three-letter-agency, but it's certainly no stretch to see how the Parent's point is true across the IC. In my experience, information is not shared between programs except where absolutely required, even if they happen to be in the same compartment.
Depending on how long ago the Parent Poster worked there, though, a lot may have changed. There's been a move away from need-to-know and toward responsibility-to-share. Intelink (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelink for some generic info) is extremely cool in concept and execution, and is very useful. I don't believe that it even could have existed in the 'old days' when agencies were more jealous of information.
As for Tice not sharing specific, actionable information... of course he's not. Hell, I've ended up deleting half my post during editing to be sure the info is generic enough that I don't let slip even an unclassified fact that isn't supposed to be mentioned. Whatever he knows is undoubtedly SCI or SAP, and he'd call down one hell of a crapstorm on himself if he breathed a single word too many. He's probably already said enough to be culpable, especially if the "existence of" the stuff he's blabbing about is classified. In that case, he's probably dancing the line between protected whistle-blower and criminally mishandling classified info.