Bush-Era Whistleblower Russ Tice Claims the NSA Spied on Obama--and a Lot of Other Powerful People
Although The Guardian made the shocking revelation earlier this month that the NSA has been collecting meta data on millions of Americans, it may come as an even bigger surprise who was among those millions. Russ Tice, a former intelligence analyst, alleged in an interview with Sibel Edmonds' Boiling Frogs podcast (launched by former FBI staffer and National Security Whistleblowers Coalition founder Sibel Edmond) that the agency has been spying on some of the most powerful people in the U.S. government. Approximately 48 minutes into the interview, Tice claimed that among the people his office surveilled was Barack Obama: "Here's the big one ... this was in summer of 2004, one of the papers that I held in my hand was to wiretap a bunch of numbers associated with a 40-something-year-old wannabe senator for Illinois... Tice was employed at various times by the Air Force, Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Tice praised Edward Snowden's exposure of PRISM.
Edward Snowden asylum: Iceland businessman says plane ready - Associated Press
LONDON (AP) — An Icelandic business executive says a private plane is on standby to transport NSA secrets leaker Edward Snowden from Hong Kong to Iceland. Olafur Vignir Sigurvinsson said Friday that while he has not spoken directly with Edward Snowden, he has been in touch with a third party representing him. The businessman has connections to the WikiLeaks secret-spilling organization. Continue Reading Sigurvinsson says he has access to planes in Hong Kong and mainland China. (PHOTOS: 10 famous/infamous whistleblowers) But Iceland's government says it has not received an asylum request from Snowden, who has revealed his role in providing secret U.S. Interior Ministry spokesman Johannes Tomasson says Snowden hasn't approached the ministry and an asylum request could only begin if Snowden is in Iceland. U.S. officials have expressed an interest in prosecuting Snowden.
Why The NSA's Secret Online Surveillance Should Scare You
The reaction to the National Security Agency (NSA)’s secret online spying program, PRISM, has been polarized between seething outrage and some variant on “what did you expect?” Some have gone so far as to say this program helps open the door to fascism, while others have downplayed it as in line with the way that we already let corporations get ahold of our personal data. That second reaction illustrates precisely why this program is so troubling. The more we accept perpetual government and corporate surveillance as the norm, the more we change our actions and behavior to fit that expectation — subtly but inexorably corrupting the liberal ideal that each person should be free to live life as they choose without fear of anyone else interfering with it. Put differently, George Orwell isn’t who you should be reading to understand the dangers inherent to the NSA’s dragnet. You’d be better off turning to famous French social theorist Michel Foucault.
Icelandic WikiLeaks Collaborators Targeted by Obama Administration
RT | June 21 2013 The Obama administration has admitted to spying on two Icelandic citizens with ties to WikiLeaks in the latest revelation pertaining to both the US government’s widespread surveillance practices and its war against the whistleblower website. Documents surfaced on Friday showing that the United States Department of Justice demanded that Internet giant Google provide federal investigators with the personal emails sent and received by two Icelanders once involved in WikiLeaks, an anti-secrecy website under investigation for publishing hundreds of thousands of classified US documents. Herbert Snorrason and Smári McCarthy, both known publically as one-time associates of the website, released Justice Department-issued search warrants and court orders for their Gmail accounts on Friday that had up until recently been kept under seal. “All this is pretty much par for the course; I had assumed that I was caught in the dragnet cast around Julian Assange,” Snorrason wrote. Pfc.
Press Turns on Snowden
The Price of the Panopticon
We privacy watchers and civil libertarians think this complacent response misses a deeply worrying political shift of vast consequence. While President Obama has conveniently described the costs of what appears to be pervasive surveillance of Americans’ telecommunications connections as “modest encroachments on privacy,” what we are actually witnessing is a sea change in the kinds of things that the government can monitor in the lives of ordinary citizens. The N.S.A. dragnet of “connection data” — who communicates with whom, where, how often and for how long — aims at finding patterns between calls or messages, and between parties with given characteristics, which correlate with increased odds of terrorist activity. These patterns can in turn cue authorities to focus attention on possible terrorists. The success rate in these operations is a matter of intense speculation, given the authorities’ closemouthed stance on the matter. The question, though, is what comes next?
The Anti-Empire Report #118
Source: William Blum Edward Snowden In the course of his professional life in the world of national security Edward Snowden must have gone through numerous probing interviews, lie-detector examinations, and exceedingly detailed background checks, as well as filling out endless forms carefully designed to catch any kind of falsehood or inconsistency. Yes, there was a sign they missed -- Edward Snowden had something inside him shaped like a conscience, just waiting for a cause. It was the same with me. My conscience had found its cause, and nothing that I could have been asked in a pre-employment interview would have alerted my interrogators of the possible danger I posed because I didn't know of the danger myself. So what is a poor National Security State to do? Eavesdropping on the planet The above is the title of an essay that I wrote in 2000 that appeared as a chapter in my book Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower.
Secret Court Ruling Put Tech Companies in Data Bind
The judges disagreed. That left Yahoo two choices: Hand over the data or break the law. So Yahoo became part of the ’s secret Internet surveillance program, Prism, according to leaked N.S.A. documents, as did seven other Internet companies. Like almost all the actions of the secret court, which operates under the , the details of its disagreement with Yahoo were never made public beyond a heavily redacted court order, one of the few public documents ever to emerge from the court. The name of the company had not been revealed until now. But the decision has had lasting repercussions for the dozens of companies that store troves of their users’ personal information and receive these national security requests — it puts them on notice that they need not even try to test their legality. Lawyers who handle national security requests for tech companies say they rarely fight in court, but frequently push back privately by negotiating with the government, even if they ultimately have to comply.
