It can't be said too many times: The NSA has been spying on American citizens for decades

[cali]

Why would anyone with with even a few functional petite cellules grises- as Hercule Poirot was wont to say- believe that they ever ceased and desisted?

In the fall of 1975, when a Senate select committee chaired by Frank Church and a House committee chaired by Otis Pike were investigating abuses of power by the CIA and FBI, Congresswoman Bella Abzug, the loaded pistol from New York (she had introduced a resolution to impeach Richard Nixon on her first day in office in 1971) dared turned her own House Subcommittee on Government Information and Individual Rights to a new subject: the National Security Agency, and two twin government surveillance projects she had learned about codenamed “SHAMROCK” and “MINARET.” They had monitored both the phone calls and telegrams of American citizens for decades.

At the time, even political junkies did not know what the NSA was. “With a reputed budget of some $1.2 billion and a manpower roster far greater than the CIA,” the Associated Press explained, it had been “established in 1952 with a charter that is still classified as top secret.” (Is it still? I’d be interested to know.) President Ford had persuaded Frank Church not to hold hearings on the matter. (Ford had something in common with Obama: hypocrisy. “In all my public and private acts as your president, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy in the end,” he’d said in his inaugural address, the one where he proclaimed, “Our long national nightmare is over.”) So Abzug proceeded on her own. At first, when she subpoenaed the executives responsible for going along with the programs the White House tried to prevent their testimony by claiming the private companies were “an agent of the United States.” When they did appear, they admitted their companies had voluntarily been turning over their full records of phone and telegram traffic to the government at the end of every single day, by courier, for over forty years, full stop. The NSA said the programs had been discontinued. Abzug claimed they still survived, just under different names. And at that, Church changed his mind: the contempt for the law here was so flagrant, he decided, he would initiate NSA hearings, too.

Conservative members of his committee issued defiant shrieks: “people’s right to know should be subordinated to the people’s right to be secure,” said Senator John Tower. It would “adversely affect our intelligence-gathering capability,” said Barry Goldwater. Church replied that this didn’t matter if the government was breaking the law. (“Tell me about the time when senators used to complain when the government broke the law, grandpa!”) He called the NSA’s director to testify before Congress for the first time in history. Appearing in uniform, Lieutenant General Lew Allen Jr. obediently disclosed that his agency’s spying on Americans was far vaster than what had even been revealed to President Ford’s blue-ribbon commission on intelligence chaired by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. He admitted that it was, technically, illegal, and had been carried out without specific approval from any president. But he declined to explain how it worked. And added that thanks to such surveillance, “we are aware that a major terrorist attack in the US was prevented.” He refused to give further details on that, either—as if daring the senators to object.

The president could comfort himself that few were paying attention. Back in August, Rockefeller Commission member Ronald Reagan had instructed his listeners, “My own reaction after months of testimony and discussion during the investigation of the CIA is ‘much ado about—if not nothing, at least very little’”: just “instances of some wrongdoing with regard to keyhole-peeking,” long since corrected by the agency itself. He claimed his commission’s most important finding—that more Soviet spies were living and working in America than ever—had been buried: instead, “the media seized upon whatever misdeeds we found and played them up possible to confirm the earlier charges and possibly because they thought they made for exciting drama.

Read more: http://www.thenation.com/blog/174722/nsa-doppleganger#ixzz2Vto4qmHH

[In_The_Wind]

1. While watching CNN in '95, I saw a news story about our TVs spying on us.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2115871/The-CIA-wants-spy-TV-Agency-director-says-net-connected-gadgets-transform-surveillance.html


The story followed one about dashboard cameras in police cruisers.

TVs were being developed with transmitters inside. The news story said they would be sold in high crime neighborhoods.

[cali]

2. kick. oh where oh where are all those swearing up and down that the NSA

isn't spying on Americans?

[kentuck]

3. But in the previous decades....

They did not have the capacity to collect 1 billion emails every day and store them. They have used technology in a detrimental way, and are getting paid handsomely for doing it, all in the name of keeping us safe from the terrorists.

[randome]

4. Really? 1970s news? Why did Boston happen?

Why does one party not overwhelm the other? Why does crime still occur?

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[font color="blue"][center]Stop looking for heroes. BE one.[/center][/font]
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[cali]

6. It's called history. As in the NSA and the CIA and other spy agencies

have a long history of spying on American citizens. Knowing that history, knowing that there is little oversight of many of their activities, knowing that they have the funds and tools and knowing that many corporations subcontracted to agencies, are involved, why would you think that it isn't happening now?

[randome]

8. Because of the laws set up to prevent that.

If you don't believe the laws are being followed, show evidence of that. Or a reasonable suspicion, even.

Ed Snowden -the guy who was talking to Greenwald before he got his job at the NSA- and who ran to Hong Kong saying "I'm not going to hide", is not a very good indicator.

[hr]
[font color="blue"][center]Stop looking for heroes. BE one.[/center][/font]
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[JoeyT]

9. Boston was because

there's just too much data to sift through. Catching someone with blanket surveillance is going to be the exception rather than the norm.

The parties are far too close for comfort on most fiscal issues and foreign policy. They're only a world apart on social issues. I'm a Democrat because the social issues are worth fighting for. A woman's right to choose, GLBT people's right to be equal, minorities right to not be discriminated against, etc are all worth fighting for.

Crime is always going to occur. Even if we made it so every citizen had a satellite that kept a camera trained on them every second of every day, there would still be crime. If nothing else if all the crime stopped we'd invent new crimes just to justify keeping cameras on everyone all the time.

[Solly Mack]

5. K&R

"And yet, for all that, Congress acted. In 1978 it passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a bipartisan law (one of its sponsors was Strom Thurmond) banning surveillance without a court order that involved acquiring “the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party.” Though it was pretty soft soap, for all that: judicial authorization was only required within seventy-two hours after the surveillance began.

Subsequent amendments have rendered it all but gone now, of course."

Yep.

[baldguy]

7. And some people on DU seem to be surprised by these "revelations" as if they're new or different.

They try to tag Obama as a fascist because the bureaucracy he inherited is following the laws Congress has passed, and which the courts have upheld. It's a paranoid, absurdist fantasy on par with Glenn Beck, Art Bell or Alex Jones.

[Laelth]

10. k&r for a good history lesson.

I take no stand (here) on the policy implications of this history, but it is good to know.

-Laelth

[Laelth]

11. Important excerpt from the article:

In 1978 {Congress} passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a bipartisan law (one of its sponsors was Strom Thurmond) banning surveillance without a court order that involved acquiring “the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party.” Though it was pretty soft soap, for all that: judicial authorization was only required within seventy-two hours after the surveillance began.

Subsequent amendments have rendered it all but gone now, of course. Congress still can speak in a bipartisan manner on the subject of surveillance. Only now, they thunder in unison, Quit your bitching! “It’s called protecting America,” Diane Feinstein said. Says her dear Republican colleague Saxby Chambliss, “This is nothing particularly new. Every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this, and to my knowledge we have not had any citizen who has registered a complaint relative to the gathering of this information.”

More Orwellian words have never been spoken. Brave new world, that has such senators in it.

We're getting a lot of "quit your bitching" these days. It irritates people a bit.

-Laelth