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You are here: MacNN Forums > Community > MacNN Lounge > Political/War Lounge > Bush Authorizes Spying on Americans.

Bush Authorizes Spying on Americans. (Page 3)
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Face Ache
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Dec 29, 2005, 08:15 PM
 
Originally Posted by SimeyTheLimey
Only the liberal media would be upset at a president for keeping sensitive classified information secret. The rest of us realize that our national security depends in part on secrets and that leaking them hurts national security.
Like leaking the identities of CIA agents?

Anyways...
NSA spied on its own employees, other U.S. intelligence personnel, journalists, and members of Congress


By Wayne Madsen
NSA spied on its own employees, other U.S. intelligence personnel, and their journalist and congressional contacts. WMR has learned that the National Security Agency (NSA), on the orders of the Bush administration, eavesdropped on the private conversations and e-mail of its own employees, employees of other U.S. intelligence agencies -- including the CIA and DIA -- and their contacts in the media, Congress, and oversight agencies and offices.

The journalist surveillance program, code named "Firstfruits," was part of a Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) program that was maintained at least until October 2004 and was authorized by then-DCI Porter Goss. Firstfruits was authorized as part of a DCI "Countering Denial and Deception" program responsible to an entity known as the Foreign Denial and Deception Committee (FDDC). Since the intelligence community's reorganization, the DCI has been replaced by the Director of National Intelligence headed by John Negroponte and his deputy, former NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden.

Firstfruits was a database that contained both the articles and the transcripts of telephone and other communications of particular Washington journalists known to report on sensitive U.S. intelligence activities, particularly those involving NSA. According to NSA sources, the targeted journalists included author James Bamford, the New York Times' James Risen, the Washington Post's Vernon Loeb, the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, the Washington Times' Bill Gertz, UPI's John C. K. Daly, and this editor [Wayne Madsen], who has written about NSA for The Village Voice, CAQ, Intelligence Online, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

In addition, beginning in 2001 but before the 9-11 attacks, NSA began to target anyone in the U.S. intelligence community who was deemed a "disgruntled employee." According to NSA sources, this surveillance was a violation of United States Signals Intelligence Directive (USSID) 18 and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. The surveillance of U.S. intelligence personnel by other intelligence personnel in the United States and abroad was conducted without any warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The targeted U.S. intelligence agency personnel included those who made contact with members of the media, including the journalists targeted by Firstfruits, as well as members of Congress, Inspectors General, and other oversight agencies. Those discovered to have spoken to journalists and oversight personnel were subjected to sudden clearance revocation and termination as "security risks."

In 2001, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rejected a number of FISA wiretap applications from Michael Resnick, the FBI supervisor in charge of counter-terrorism surveillance. The court said that some 75 warrant requests from the FBI were erroneous and that the FBI, under Louis Freeh and Robert Mueller, had misled the court and misused the FISA law on dozens of occasions. In a May 17, 2002 opinion, the presiding FISA Judge, Royce C. Lamberth (a Texan appointed by Ronald Reagan), barred Resnick from ever appearing before the court again. The ruling, released by Lamberth's successor, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelley, stated in extremely strong terms, "In virtually every instance, the government's misstatements and omissions in FISA applications and violations of the Court's orders involved information sharing and unauthorized disseminations to criminal investigators and prosecutors . . . How these misrepresentations occurred remains unexplained to the court."

After the Justice Department appealed the FISC decision, the FISA Review court met for the first time in its history. The three-member review court, composed of Ralph Guy of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Edward Leavy of the 9th Circuit, and Laurence Silberman [of the Robb-Silberman Commission on 911 "intelligence failures"] of the D.C. Circuit, overturned the FISC decision on the Bush administration's wiretap requests.

Based on recent disclosures that the Bush administration has been using the NSA to conduct illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens, it is now becoming apparent what vexed the FISC to the point that it rejected, in an unprecedented manner, numerous wiretap requests and sanctioned Resnick.

******

Wayne Madsen is a Washington DC-based muckraking journalist and columnist. He was a communications security analyst with the National Security Agency in the 1980s, and an intelligence officer in the US Navy.
     
black bear theory
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Jul 2, 2006, 11:25 PM
 
interesting. kind of debunks the whole '9/11 changed everything' argument.

bush wanted warrantless wire-tapping before 9/11.

Spy Agency Sought U.S. Call Records Before 9/11, Lawyers Say
June 30 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court papers filed in New York federal court.

The allegation is part of a court filing adding AT&T, the nation's largest telephone company, as a defendant in a breach of privacy case filed earlier this month on behalf of Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. customers. The suit alleges that the three carriers, the NSA and President George W. Bush violated the Telecommunications Act of 1934 and the U.S. Constitution, and seeks money damages.

"The Bush Administration asserted this became necessary after 9/11,'' plaintiff's lawyer Carl Mayer said in a telephone interview. "This undermines that assertion.''
so, as near as i can figure, bush either knew about 9/11 beforehand, or, more likely, he had it out for our civil rights before the WoT even started.

:/

thoughts?
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tie
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Jul 3, 2006, 01:51 AM
 
I expect Simey will explain to us how it was all strictly legal anyway. And blame the NY Times and terrorist-sympathizing liberals. Then he'll explain how stupid we are, and how our time is much better spent worrying about flag-burners than about our handling of the war on terror.
     
SimeyTheLimey
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Jul 3, 2006, 06:13 AM
 
Originally Posted by black bear theory
interesting. kind of debunks the whole '9/11 changed everything' argument.

bush wanted warrantless wire-tapping before 9/11.

Spy Agency Sought U.S. Call Records Before 9/11, Lawyers Say


so, as near as i can figure, bush either knew about 9/11 beforehand, or, more likely, he had it out for our civil rights before the WoT even started.

:/

thoughts?
It's an allegation in a class action tort lawsuit. That's not exactly an unbiased source of information.
     
Y3a
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Jul 3, 2006, 06:33 AM
 
Originally Posted by black bear theory
interesting. kind of debunks the whole '9/11 changed everything' argument.

bush wanted warrantless wire-tapping before 9/11.

Spy Agency Sought U.S. Call Records Before 9/11, Lawyers Say


so, as near as i can figure, bush either knew about 9/11 beforehand, or, more likely, he had it out for our civil rights before the WoT even started.

:/

thoughts?
Perhaps, unlike the Clintons BEFORE, the Bush Admin actually understood we may have been infiltrated and we needed to know to what extent. He is right to do ths to protect our lives, et al, but the idealists who don't get the implications of real world events don't see this. We should all die for the interpretation of words? "Rights" for terrorists caught on the battlefield? ACLU style nonsense! I'm sure that if you take a bunch of ACLU lawyers to Iraq, they would either get killed, or realize that they were wrong and change.
     
SimeyTheLimey
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Jul 3, 2006, 06:56 AM
 
That is not fair and not accurate. The Clinton Administration was fully aware that al-Queda was likely to attempt another attack on the US mainland. This was fully understood years before 9/11 by both parties and by civil servants. The scale and means used by al-Queda was a shock, but not the fact that such an attack occurred. The first WTC bombing was al-Queda as well, so it is not like 9/11 was a bolt out of the blue. Many people in the US may have been surprised, but people involved in the national security apparatus were in a general sense, expecting it. It was pretty obvious, given the way al-Queda were stepping up their attacks on Americans throughout the 1990s.

To take a small example, high profile public buildings inside the US were being upgraded using lessons learned from the African embassy bombings and the first WTC bombing. The Pentagon was one such building, and it ended up saving many lives. It's not that they knew that the Pentagon would be attacked, but rather that they knew it was a likely target of the kind of large truck bomb attack that they expected would be attempted again in the US.

I'm sure that the government was quietly doing many other things in the years prior to 9/11 to improve our abilities to tackle international terrorist organizations. Many of those things would have gathered urgency after 9/11, especially when Congress changed the law giving us more tools to act. But whether this lawsuit's allegations are among them is decidedly uncertain. Tort lawsuits routinely make wild allegations, and the vast majority of them are dismissed as unfounded.
     
DanMacMan
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Jul 3, 2006, 11:01 PM
 
Thirty-five years ago yesterday, in the Supreme Court ruling that stopped the government from suppressing the secret Vietnam War history called the Pentagon Papers, Justice Hugo Black wrote: "The government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the government and inform the people."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/01/op...606&ei=5087%0A
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SimeyTheLimey
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Jul 4, 2006, 08:25 AM
 
That is a prior restraint case. Nobody is arguing that the government has the power to enjoin the NYT from publishing. We are saying that the NYT should have used good judgment and self restraint.

That is the problem with people like Keller. He thinks the rights accorded him (and equally every citizen) by the First Amendment come without responsibility.
     
 
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