Reply #22: The programs ... made public so far... just the tip of the iceberg... [View All]

[L. Coyote]

Inside the Puzzle Palace
A Reason interview with NSA whistleblower Russell Tice
Julian Sanchez | January 13, 2006
http://www.reason.com/news/show/33016.html


In December, New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau commandeered the news cycle with the revelation that President Bush had approved a program of warrantless wiretaps of domestic-to-international communications by the super-secretive National Security Agency. Days later, they disclosed that the NSA's electronic eavesdropping may have been far more extensive than initial reports suggested, involving the harvesting of enormous volumes of telcommunications data for analysis.

.......... The programs that have been made public so far, according to Tice, are just the tip of the iceberg. .....

....I'm referring to what I need to tell Congress that no one knows yet, which is only tertiarily connected to what you know about now.

REASON: What aspect of that, within the parameters of what you're able to talk about, concerned you?

Tice: The lack of oversight, mainly—when a problem arose and I raised concerns, the total lack of concern that anyone could be held accountable for any illegality involved. And then these things are so deep black, the extremely sensitive programs that I was a specialist in, these things are so deep black that only a minute few people are cleared for these things. So even if you have a concern, it's things in many cases your own supervisor isn't cleared for. So you have literally nowhere to go. ...

Tice: In my case, there's no way the programs I want to talk to Congress about should be public ever, unless maybe in 200 years they want to declassify them. You should never learn about it; no one at the Times should ever learn about these things. But that same mechanism that allows you to have a program like this at an extremely high, sensitive classification level could also be used to mask illegality, like spying on Americans. And spying on Americans is illegal unless you go to a FISA court. It's the job of the FBI to conduct operations against Americans with the proper court warrants....