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Thursday, January 12, 2006

NSA Whistleblower: Bring it on!

A former NSA employee acknowledges that he is a source for the leaks about domestic spying -- and he says that communications from millions of Americans could have been monitored. ABC News had the story January 10 (hat tip again to Laura Rozen):
Russell Tice, a longtime insider at the National Security Agency, is now a whistleblower the agency would like to keep quiet....

Tice tells ABC News that some of those secret "black world" operations run by the NSA were operated in ways that he believes violated the law. He is prepared to tell Congress all he knows about the alleged wrongdoing in these programs run by the Defense Department and the NSA in the post-9/11 efforts to go after terrorists.

"The mentality was we need to get these guys, and we're going to do whatever it takes to get them," he said.

Tracking Calls

Tice says the technology exists to track and sort through every domestic and international phone call as they are switched through centers, such as one in New York, and to search for key words or phrases that a terrorist might use.

"If you picked the word 'jihad' out of a conversation," Tice said, "the technology exists that you focus in on that conversation, and you pull it out of the system for processing."

According to Tice, intelligence analysts use the information to develop graphs that resemble spiderwebs linking one suspect's phone number to hundreds or even thousands more.

Tice Admits Being a Source for The New York Times

President Bush has admitted that he gave orders that allowed the NSA to eavesdrop on a small number of Americans without the usual requisite warrants.

But Tice disagrees. He says the number of Americans subject to eavesdropping by the NSA could be in the millions if the full range of secret NSA programs is used.

"That would mean for most Americans that if they conducted, or you know, placed an overseas communication, more than likely they were sucked into that vacuum," Tice said.
Tice says that the agency committed "abuses" that need to be addressed.

Tice's security clearance was apparently stripped away last May and he was eventually fired because of "psychological concerns."


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