Investigations, Anyone? Maybe a Prosecution or Two?

Russell Tice, one of the NSA whistleblowers who exposed the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program, is speaking out now that the Bush administration is gone. On Countdown, Tice described, partially, the extent of the illegal wiretapping program.

First, on the scope of the data monitoring:

OLBERMANN: Let's start with the review. We heard the remarks from Mr. Bush in 2005, that only Americans who would have been eavesdropped on without a warrant were those who were talking to terrorists overseas. Based on what you know, what you have seen firsthand and what you have encountered in your experience, how much of that statement was true?

TICE: Well, I don't know what our former president knew or didn't know. I'm sort of down in the weeds. But the National Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications, faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications. And that doesn't -- it didn't matter whether you were in Kansas, you know, in the middle of the country, and you never made a communication -- foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications.

OLBERMANN: To what degree is that likely to mean actual eavesdropping and actual inspection? In other words, if not actually read or monitored by the NSA, everything was collected by the NSA, recorded, archived? Do you have any idea to what degree the information was ever looked at, per se?

TICE: Well, it's actually, even for the NSA, it's impossible to literally collect all communications. Americans tend to be a chatty group. We have the best computers at the agency, but certainly not that good.

But what was done was a sort of an ability to look at the meta data, the signaling data for communications, and ferret that information to determine what communications would ultimately be collected. Basically, filtering out sort of like sweeping everything with that meta data, and then cutting down ultimately what you are going to look at and what is going to be collected, and in the long run have an analyst look at, you know, needles in a haystack for what might be of interest.

Who was targeted?

OLBERMANN: I mention that you say specific groups were targeted. What group or groups can you tell us about?

TICE: Well, there's sort of two avenues to look at this. What I just mentioned was sort of the low-tech dragnet look at this. The things that I specifically were involved with were more on the high-tech side. And try to envision, you know, the dragnets are out there, collecting all the fish and then ferreting out what they may. And my technical angle was to try to harpoon fish from an airplane kind of thing. So it's two separate worlds.

But in the world that I was in, as to not harpoon the wrong people in some -- in one of the operations that I was in, we looked at organizations just supposedly so that we would not target them. So that we knew where they were, so as not to have a problem with them.

Now, what I was finding out, though, is that the collection on those organizations was 24/7, and you know, 365 days a year, and it made no sense. And that's -- I started to investigate that. That's about the time when they came after me, to fire me. But an organization that was collected on were U.S. news organizations and reporters and journalists.

OLBERMANN: To what purpose? I mean, is there a file somewhere full of every e-mail sent by all the reporters at the "New York Times?" Is there a recording somewhere of every conversation I had with my little nephew in upstate New York? Is it like that?

TICE: If it was involved in this specific avenue of collection, it would be everything. Yes. It would be everything.

OLBERMANN: Do you have a sense of why, as you discovered this? I mean, do you have a sense of what this was, if it was used, to what end?

TICE: I do not know. I do not know what was done with the collection. I'm sure the information -- the collection was digitized and put on databases somewhere. I don't know what was done with it from that point.

On how Congress was kept in the dark about these activities:

OLBERMANN: And this bait-and-switch sort of idea, that this -- this is the discard pile, we are not going to look at the media, and then it becomes apparent to you that the discard pile is in fact the save pile. How did that become apparent to you?

TICE: Well, as I was going for support for this particular organization, it sort of was dropped to me that, you know, this is 24/7. Because I was saying, you know, I need collection at this time, at this point for, you know, for a window of time. And I would say, will we have the capability at this particular point? And positioning assets, and I was ultimately told we don't have to worry about that, because we've got it covered all the time. And that's when it clicked in my head, this is not something that's being done on a onesy basis, onesy-twosie. This is something that's happening all the time.

OLBERMANN: In a broad sense, and I imagine this question could be asked a hundred times with much more specificity, but what other kinds of information are you aware of that was collected by the NSA on ordinary Americans?

TICE: On ordinary Americans? I don't know. The parameters that were set for how to filter that -- now we are back to the low-tech side -- were things like looking for parameters like if a terrorist normally would only make a phone call for one or two minutes, then you look for communications that are only one or two minutes long. Now, that also could be someone ordering a pizza and asking their significant other what sort of toppings that they wanted on their pizza. That is about a one- to two-minute phone call.

OLBERMANN: We mentioned this idea of bait-and-switch, of this is the discard, no, it's not; this is actually the target. Can you explain the maneuver, another sort of bait-and-switch that was worked with the congressional committees that would have had to be asking questions about stuff exactly like this?

TICE: Well, the agency would tailor some of their briefings to try to be deceptive for -- whether it be, you know, a congressional committee or someone they really didn't want to know exactly what was going on. So there would be a lot of bells and whistles in a briefing, and quite often, you know, the meat of the briefing was deceptive.

One of the things that could be done was you could take something that was part of the Department of Defense, make it part of the intelligence community, and put a caveat to that, and make that whatever the intelligence community is doing for support will ultimately be given a different caveat. So when the defense committees on the Hill come calling, you say, you can't look at that because that's an intelligence program.

OLBERMANN: Right.

TICE: But when the intelligence program comes calling, you say you can't look at that because it is a Department of Defense program.

OLBERMANN: Right.

TICE: So you basically have a little shell game that you are playing back and forth.

OLBERMANN: It's brilliant in its simplicity. It's wonderful in its simplicity in a different context.

So maybe NOW we can get an investigation or two of this program? Maybe even with an outlook toward prosecutions?

We went into the fight over warrantless wiretapping and the FISA Amendments Act last year with far too little information. That was why we fought so hard against telco amnesty--because the legal fight against the telcos was one of the last avenues available, at the time, for finding out just what was going on with this program. With a new administration, we should have another avenue or two open up, in the form of our new Justice Department. A Justice Department that included Marty Lederman in what used to be John Yoo's position. That would be the Marty Lederman who wrote many incisive and elucidating posts about warrantless wiretapping and FISA (as well as torture and the myriad of executive abuses of the former administration) at Balkinization.

The questions we had then are now tripled: Who was targeted and why? When did this program begin? What exactly was behind the NSA's efforts to enlist Qwest in warrantless wiretaps in February, 2001--months before 9/11, and what other telcos did they approach at that time, and to what purpose? That's just scratching the surface of questions that need to be asked, and it's about fucking time we get some answers. And that the FISA Amendment Act that legalized so many of these abuses, including bulk collection of data, be repealed.

There's ongoing discussion of these revelations in gimmeshelter's and RiderOnTheStorm's recommended diaries.