It’s an invitation into the shadowy world of conspiracy theory.
As you can see in the video below, the first NSA whistle blower, Russell Tice, is making some heavy charges. No, he says, NSA is listening in on calls, not just collecting metadata. The NSA listened in on Barack Obama, when he was running for Senate; they spied on Supreme Court justice Alito, as well as General Petraeus. They’ve spied on any general above a three star level, and also Hillary Clinton, Senators John McCain and Diane Feinstein, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell.
The activity seemed to take place in the evenings, and seemed to be directed by someone connected to the vice president at the time, Dick Cheney. And Tice, though a Republican, decided to vote for Obama just on the hope that Obama would follow through and stop the abuse.
Tice is asked—why is this going on, is it blackmail? He fumbles for a bit, and then says the obvious. What else can it be?
It’s an old trick. When I was growing up, the local police chief had secret files on people, and knew that an alderman had a daughter working as a prostitute in a west coast city. That kind of information comes in handy when the police need a little boost in budget, of the chief himself needs a little help in a corruption scandal.
What’s new is the capacity to snoop, and the sheer power that we—or is it they?—have to spy. Here’s Tice on the subject:
Although an anonymous senior Obama administration official said that "on its face" the court order revealed by the Guardian did not authorise the government to listen in on people's phone calls, Tice now believes the NSA has constructed such a capability.
"I figured it would probably be about 2015" before the NSA had "the computer capacity … to collect all digital communications word for word," Tice said. "But I think I'm wrong. I think they have it right now."
I came on Tice through the usual circuitous path—investigating a report that Gilberto Valle, a NYPD cop, had been found guilty of accessing an FBI database, the National Crime Information Center, obtaining information, plotting to abduct women, all for the purpose of…
…eating them.
OK—my day has not been improved by realizing that there is a fetish—for some—for cannibalism. Valle, who was turned in by his wife, maintains that it was an innocent, though kinky, fetish. The prosecution maintained that he was on a street corner where he had said he’d be in one of his communications—and the block of the street where one of his “victims” lived. Was he there to abduct? Had he moved out of fantasy and into the street?
However interesting the question, the point is that he tapped into a system that 90,000 law enforcement agencies can access. Here’s Business Insider on the subject:
• Tom Hays of The Associated Press reports there are "a batch of corruption cases in recent years against NYPD officers accused of abusing the FBI-operated National Crime Information Center database to cyber snoop on co-workers, tip off drug dealers, stage robberies and — most notoriously — scheme to abduct and eat women."
Speaking of which, the same article goes on to say this:
In 2008 two former NSA analysts who worked at the NSA center in Fort Gordon, Georgia told ABC they and their coworkers had listened in on the personal phone calls of soldiers stationed overseas.
"Hey, check this out," one said he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy.'"
No, it wasn’t crazy. It’s scary, and much more.
Tice was the original whistle blower, leaking the phone monitoring scandal in 2005. And at the end of the interview, he’s asked, “are we living in a police state?”
His answer is nuanced: it a light police state. No, we don’t have all the oppression of the old communist regimes. We’ve learned subtlety; the iron fist wears a velvet glove but is—after all…
A fist.
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