Former NSA intelligence analyst Russel Tice has blown the whistle on Bush’s complete, mass surveillance of US citizens. Tice’s involvement in the NSA program was to identify specific groups of interest, such as journalists, based on an analysis of their communications. When Tice realized that he had access to complete, 24/7 intercepts of every communication involving these groups, he determined that such access amounted to total surveillance of large groups of US citizens. Contrary to official claims, these groups certainly had no established terrorist connections, and were in fact “plain citizens.”

From the Interview (transcription is my own):

Tice: An organization that was collected on were US news organizations and reporters and journalists.

Olbermann: To what purpose, I mean is there a file somewhere full of every email 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 the specific avenue of collection, it would be everything. Yes. It would be everything.

Tice makes it clear US journalists are one such group “in the specific avenue of collection,” and that their records have been stored in a database at the NSA. It is chilling to know that this information is now on record, to be analyzed in any manner at any time, possibly decades down the road.

RTFA: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/12/feds-eff-…

The Bush administration on Tuesday will try to convince a federal judge to let stand a law granting retroactive legal immunity to the nation’s telecoms, which are accused of transmitting Americans’ private communications to the National Security Agency without warrants.

At issue in the high-stakes showdown – set to begin at 10:00 a.m. PST – are the nearly four dozen lawsuits filed by civil liberties groups and class action attorneys against AT&T, Verizon, MCI, Sprint and other carriers who allegedly cooperated with the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program in the years following the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The lawsuits claim the cooperation violated federal wiretapping laws and the Constitution.

In July, as part of a wider domestic spying bill, Congress voted to kill the lawsuits and grant retroactive amnesty to any phone companies that helped with the surveillance; President-elect Barack Obama was among those who voted for the law in the Senate. On Tuesday, lawyers with the Electronic Frontier Foundation are set to urge the federal judge overseeing those lawsuits to reject immunity as unconstitutional. At stake, they say, is the very principle of the rule of law in America.

“I think it does set a very frightening precedent that it’s okay for people to break the law because they can just have Congress bail them out later,” says EFF legal director Cindy Cohn. “It’s very troubling.”

I watched the FISA debate on the Senate floor, and although I was sometimes encouraged by the discussion, I was equally disappointed by the arguments I heard.

Retroactive Immunity is unacceptable if only because there were some phone companies that refused to comply, on the basis that they suspected it was illegal. Let’s be clear: certain companies proactively determined this would be illegal. This is a perfect case for a … what do you call it? Oh yeah: a Judge. See, a Judge would clear up the uncertainty because there’d be a record of the judgment. This could later be overturned, but that’s a world apart from the current situation.

The whole idea about warrants (or the FISA court, for that matter) is to determine if an action is legal BEFORE you commit that action.