NSA Spying Revelations Continue

Russell Tice continues to blow the whistle, this time with Wired:

The big reason why they would put the San Francisco operation at such a high classification level is to hide the fact that they're breaking the law and to hide the fact that they're breaking the NSA's own policy. It should be [the sort of project] that any NSA analyst should be able to walk in and have access to. But to cloister it away where only a few people know about it means that it's something they don't want anyone to know about. ...

Say we're doing that same sort of deal overseas against a foreigner. ... More than likely anyone in NSA could potentially have access to that information. It wouldn't be compartmentalized. So if we set up that same scenario, even covertly in some frame room in Bucharest or something, anyone at NSA with a TS/SCI clearance could potentially look at intelligence reports from information garnered from that particular collection point. So all of a sudden that same thing is being used here in the states and it's being put into a special SAP program -- Special Access Program. ... They're extremely closely held programs that are super-duper clearance nonsense. It's what I specialized for the last eleven years or whatever.

Q: So you're saying that San Francisco and this other room [in Bridgeton] reek of "super-duper" secrecy?

Tice: Yes, it reeks of SAP. Potentially. For NSA to do what they did ... it means that they knew that it was illegal and the reason they put this super high clearance on it was because they were protecting their own hides to keep anyone within NSA from finding out that it was going on. ...

Let me tell you, the biggest sweat that happened at NSA happened when John Kerry almost got elected president [in 2004], because they were concerned they were all going to be thrown in jail. They were all wiping sweat off their forehead when he lost. That's the scuttlebutt.