Russell Tice Confirms Everything We’ve Surmised About Bush’s Illegal Wiretap Program

[babylonsister]

Russell Tice Confirms Everything We’ve Surmised About Bush’s Illegal Wiretap Program
By: emptywheel Wednesday January 21, 2009 10:57 pm



Teddy linked to the stunning Russell Tice appearance on Keith O tonight. I wanted to add a few points.

First, Tice's description of the program confirms everything we have surmised about the program. The program:

* Established the means to collect all American communications
* Analyzed meta-data to select a smaller subset of communications to tap further
* Conducted human analysis of those messages

That is, the Bush administration used meta-data (things like length of phone call that have nothing to do with terrorism) to pick which communications to actually open and read, and then they opened and read them.

And of course, everyone's communications--everyone's--were included in the totality of communications that might be tapped.

Including--especially--journalists. We knew that both Christiane Amanpour and Lawrence Wright's communications were tapped. Well, apparently so were every other journalists'.

Tice figured out that they were getting journalists' communications when he realized that they were separating out all the journalists' communications--but then ensuring that those communications were still collected 24/7.

more/video at link...

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/01/21/russell-tice-confirms-everything-weve-surmised-about-bushs-illegal-wiretap-program/

[Warpy]

1. The whole thing was developed at the university level

and some of the papers are still out there. Most have been classified.

What "meta data" means is the totality of written and spoken communication. Certain words and phrases would trigger computer analysis of the whole communication set. If the computer analysis popped up "suspicious," then humans would take over and sift through the hours of drivel in the vain hope of finding something useful.

Some of the words and phrases are obvious, military terms for explosives and weapons. Others were totally innocuous.

It's an exercise in futility, really, since real bad guys talk in code.

[kentuck]

2. And so were Blago and other Democratic politicians??

Perhaps?

[azul]

3. Is there any news source remaining that could report this with the authority it requires?

Divorced from business interests and government censorship?

The MSM is losing business for a reason: credibility.

[babylonsister]

4. I've been checking all morning: the ONLY people reporting on this

interview are bloggers. So far. You'd think the m$m, print and tv, might be a bit chafed to discover they've been spied on, but I've seen no indication of that yet.

[loudsue]

5. MSM Corporate bosses were probably privy to what their journalists were saying...

They probably enjoyed it. The big wigs in MSM are the SAME people who were meeting with the bush gang and other corporate big wigs in Nebraska on 9/11. They are all culpable.

[Soylent Brice]

6. they're probably shitting in their pants.

who knows what kind of skeletons were unearthed during the surveillance. another theory could be that is WHY telecoms were granted retro-active immunity and went along with the spying in the first place. maybe the gov't started surveilling the media using the NSA at first BEFORE they started utilizing telecom companies, and then approached them with data they collected and blackmailed them into helping them (bushco) with the warantlees wiretapping.

:shrug:

and here we are, picking up the pieces, slowly working our way backwards.