Contrary to WaPo, NSA Massive Domestic Spying Predates 2005

[ProSense]

Contrary to WaPo, NSA Massive Domestic Spying Predates 2005

Jesselyn Radack

The Washington Post has a front page story featuring embattled National Security Agency (NSA) Director Gen. Keith Alexander's hoarding complex.

“Rather than look for a single needle in the haystack, his approach was, ‘Let’s collect the whole haystack,’ ” said one former senior U.S. intelligence official who tracked the plan’s implementation. “Collect it all, tag it, store it. . . . And whatever it is you want, you go searching for it.”

While I consider WaPo reporter Ellen Nakashima to be one of the most aggressive national security journalists in the mainstream media and applaud her continued tenacity in covering these issues, she is far too well-informed to be implying that the NSA's massive domestic spying operation began with Alexander in 2005.

Commendably, Nakashima quotes my client, NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake in today's piece:

“He is absolutely obsessed and completely driven to take it all, whenever possible,” said Thomas Drake, a former NSA official and whistleblower. The continuation of Alexander’s policies, Drake said, would result in the “complete evisceration of our civil liberties.”

However, Nakashima should know, from her own reporting on the failed Espionage Act case against Drake, that NSA's desire to collect all Americans' domestic communications long predates Alexander.

In fact, my client Binney warned that the massive domestic data collection began under Gen. Michael Hayden, Alexander's predecessor:

Binney, for his part, believes that the agency now stores copies of all e-mails transmitted in America, in case the government wants to retrieve the details later. In the past few years, the N.S.A. has built enormous electronic-storage facilities in Texas and Utah. Binney says that an N.S.A. e-mail database can be searched with “dictionary selection,” in the manner of Google. After 9/11, he says, “General Hayden reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.”

<...>

The WaPo article implies that Alexander began hoarding hundreds of millions of Americans communications in 2005 to gather intelligence in Iraq. (How collecting hundreds of millions of innocent communications would assist in gleaning intelligence on possible attacks in Iraq is a question no government official has been able to answer). But, the reality is that NSA's massive domestic data collection began almost immediately after 9/11 and has continued unabated since. Bush claimed the power to spy on innocent Americans as some inherent executive power (it is not) and now Obama claims the FISA Amendments Act and PATRIOT Act allow the spying (they do not). But for innocent Americans whose data the government hoards, both Presidents and Congress have crossed partisan lines to consistently and secretly cast Americans' privacy aside for over a decade.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/15/1223752/-Contrary-to-WaPo-NSA-Massive-Domestic-Spying-Predates-2005

I'm not a fan of Radack because she often ignores the safeguards put in place by the Obama administration, but everyone should know that the activities of the NSA and reporting on overreach predates 2005.

It was in 2005 that Thomas Tamm revealed Bush's illegal spying.

Remember whistleblower Thomas Tamm?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023032225

[allin99]

1. and the gov't is still lying about it. sry, being erroneous about it.

[ProSense]

2. Kick! n/t

[Scurrilous]

3. K & R

Thanks.