Revelations From Bush Era: American Journalists Spied Upon

Ken AshfordWiretapping & SurveillanceLeave a Comment

One day into his administration, and Obama is already making leaps and bounds in removing the secrecy that so characterized the Bush Administration.  In the sweep of a pen, Obama has made the process of governing more open and transparent.

But the damage has been done.  MSNBC's Keith Olbermann interviewed Russell Tice, a former National Security Agency analyst last night. Tice says that, under the ruse of making sure that the NSA did NOT target American media and journalists, they actually collected information on every communication those journalists and media organizations had 24/7.
 

And it gets potentially worse:
"The National Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications — faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications," Tice claimed. "It didn't matter whether you were in Kansas, in the middle of the country, and you never made foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications."

Tice further explained that "even for the NSA it's impossible to literally collect all communications. … What was done was sort of an ability to look at the metadata … and ferret that information to determine what communications would ultimately be collected."