Who's Crazy?

Well—so where is everybody? A guy comes out and says that he tapped Obama’s phone, as well as Senator Feinstein, Supreme Court justice Alito, General David Petraeus, and a host of others. He goes on to suggest that Obama may be being blackmailed, and that there is a sinister force at work. He calls it a “rogue agency that has J. Edgar Hoover capabilities at a monstrous scale on steroids."

And the guy—Russell Tice—has a track record: he worked for twenty years in the Air Force, Office of Naval Intelligence, Department of Intelligence Agency, and ended up in the National Security Agency. He turned to The New York Times in 2005, and was one of the principal sources for the wiretapping revelations published that year.

So he has the connections, and he has big news—shouldn’t be a problem to pick up the phone and get the news splashed over the country’s papers, computer screens, and cell phones. Instead, with the exception of the Huffington Post, the mainstream media have ignored Tice’s most recent allegations.

Instead, Tice had to go to another whistleblower, Sibel Edmonds, and make his revelations on her Boiling Frogs podcast. And Sibel, who worked as a translator for the FBI until 2002, makes a damning charge: the mainstream media are controlled by the corporations and the government. She tells the story of MSNBC who sent a town car to pick up Tice for an interview, and then cancelled the interview on the way to the studio. Huffington Post picked up the news, and then MSNBC called again, stating that they hadn’t canceled, rather they had only meant to reschedule. The town car arrives again, and all is well until minutes before the interview. Then, Tice is told that MSNBC’s New York lawyers have advised them—don’t talk about the recent allegations, just talk in general terms. He protests: he’s in the studio to do just that, but goes through with the interview, anyway.

Edmonds makes further charges in an interview on the James Corbett Report. She alleges that the whistleblowing process that is supposed to protect people who step forward is completely ineffective. And she should know: she was fired in 2002 and the FBI’s own internal process stated that it was likely true that “some” of her claims of retaliation were true.

She also maintains that the FBI keeps both digital and paper files in huge quantities. And if, in the process of investigating a person who FISA has issued an order on, the FBI gets information on another, non-FISA ordered person—the policy is to destroy that evidence. Does it? No way—it keeps everything, because guess what? It may come in handy.

Edmonds makes the point that Congress has never taken on the FBI in any meaningful way—removing a director, taking it to the justice department, etc.

Edmonds goes places I wouldn’t go. She’s convinced that the Boston bombings were a government sponsored set up; she has appeared on The Alex Jones Show. It’s hard to know—who’s telling the truth?

But check out the two clips below—and you decide.   

The Rest of the Story?

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.'"

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-nsa-can-abuse-data-on-americans-2013-7#ixzz2YesFhNIz

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.