Like Julian Assange, Edward Snowden is a media-trumpeted whistleblower hero. Like Assange, Snowden has striking, TV-star good looks. Like Assange, Snowden is involved in a dramatic TV-style chase across countries and continents.
It's almost like Assange and Snowden are starring in their own reality-TV shows.
With all the hoopla about Snowden (and before him, Assange), it's easy to forget all of the other whistleblowers who have revealed even more explosive information.
Consider two other NSA whistleblowers: Russ Tice and James Bamford.
Russ Tice is a former NSA intelligence analyst who has also worked for the US Air Force, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He was a real US intelligence insider, many pay grades above rookie contractor Edward Snowden.
In 2005, Tice blew the whistle on the NSA's illegal spying on Americans. Tice and other NSA sources revealed that the NSA's computerized spy program ECHELON was reading and filtering over 100,000 emails and phone calls per second. That is an even worse abuse of Americans' Constitutional rights than the programs that Snowden has revealed, which store copies of emails and phone calls but (allegedly) do not read them except when legally authorized to do so.
Worse yet, Tice's revelations raise even more troubling issues. Tice and his NSA whistleblower colleagues revealed that the NSA's massive, illegal spy-on-Americans program began in February, 2001 -
seven months BEFORE the 9/11 attacks! As Andrew Harris reported for Bloomberg in July, 2006:
“The US National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court papers filed in New York federal court... 'The Bush Administration asserted this became necessary after 9/11,' plaintiff's lawyer Carl Mayer said in a telephone interview. 'This undermines that assertion.'''
The illegal NSA spy-on-Americans program apparently “became necessary” several months before 9/11, not after 9/11. Why?
In an interview entitled “NSA Whistleblower Russ Tice Alleges NSA Wiretapped Barack Obama as Senate Candidate” Russ Tice recently explained to FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds the real purpose of the NSA's illegal spying on Americans: To collect blackmail material and other information that can be used to control influential citizens.
In short: The whole purpose of the NSA spy program was to enable 9/11, protect the perpetrators, and maintain the 9/11-triggered covert dictatorship.
Before 9/11, the neoconservatives of the Bush-Cheney Administration needed to ensure that no influential Americans would dare to stand up against the coming coup d'état. So they directed the NSA to begin wiretapping the American people.
PressTV - Snowden’s revelations just tip of NSA spy scandal iceberg
