Before Edward Snowden was Thomas Drake, and before Drake was William Binney, and before Binney was Russell Tice.  Russ Tice is a former Intelligence Analyst with the NSA, specializing in satellite systems.  He inadvertently discovered that Americans were being spied on with US military intelligence space capabilities.  NSA was targeting journalists and news organizations, international businesses, law firms and lawyers, and also the State Department, high-ranking admirals and generals, Senators, Representatives, Supreme Court Justices, and then Senatorial-hopeful Barack Obama.

Tice speculates that blackmail and control is the obvious motivation for these wiretaps, and observes that the intelligence budget has somehow escaped sequester budget cuts, and it seems that the intelligence agency gets whatever they want.  Tice speculates that the upper echelon of the intelligence community is running our government.

Tice points out that both GW Bush and Obama have lied about NSA spying capabilities and spying operations within America.  The NSA is gathering not just metadata, but content, of every email, phone call, video call, and instant message in the entire country.

Tice:  “I sort of consider this sort of a light police state, because they’re hiding the fact that it’s a police state.  I mean, the fact that they can literally go into all of our communications, all our digital communications, the fact that it’s been disclosed recently that the Post Office is now doing a cover on every tangible letter that goes through the Post Office, they’re taking a picture of everything, they’re looking at the return address and they’re looking at the main address of who’s mailing something, and that is also being digitally stored.  So every means of communication in this country, everything, is being watched by the federal government, and that is Orwellian, and that is a trademark of a police state.”

 

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