i'm anxiously awaiting some more technical detail on all these black programs so heavily compartmentalized beyond accountability. this is my favorite Russ Tice quote: "there's no way the programs I want to talk to Congress about should be public ever, unless maybe in 200 years they want to declassify them. You should never learn about it; no one at the Times should ever learn about these things. But that same mechanism that allows you to have a program like this at an extremely high, sensitive classification level could also be used to mask illegality, like spying on Americans." [1] http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0516/dailyUpdate.html ---selective-cuts--- Arkin says that all these activities revolve around two key questions: are these just "ingestion and digestion" designed to catch more terrorists, or are they the "the building blocks of a new seamless surveillance culture?" ... ""We should be terrified that Congress has not been doing its job and because all of the checks and balances put in place to prevent this have been deliberately obviated. In order to get this done, the NSA and White House went around all of the checks and balances. I'm convinced that 20 years from now we, as historians, will be looking back at this as one of the darkest eras in American history. And we're just beginning to sort of peel back the first layers of the onion. We're hoping against hope that it's not as bad as I suspect it will be, but reality sets in every time a new article is published and the first thing the Bush administration tries to do is quash the story. It's like the lawsuit brought by [the Electronic Frontier Foundation] against AT&T the government's first reaction was to try to quash the lawsuit. That ought to be a warning sign that they're on to something."" - Matthew Aid ... Meanwhile, National Journal's CongressDaily reported last week that Russell Tice, a former NSA employee who was also one of the sources who revealed the warrantless wiretapping story to The New York Times, is going to give Senate Armed Services Committee staffers more information Wednesday about the activities of the NSA during the tenure of Gen. Michael Hayden. He says some of the things he will tell the committee include the news that "not only do employees at the agency believe the activities they are being asked to perform are unlawful, but that what has been disclosed so far is only the tip of the iceberg." ' [Tice] said he plans to tell the committee staffers the NSA conducted illegal and unconstitutional surveillance of US citizens while he was there with the knowledge of Hayden. ... "I think the people I talk to next week are going to be shocked when I tell them what I have to tell them. It's pretty hard to believe," Tice said. "I hope that they'll clean up the abuses and have some oversight into these programs, which doesn't exist right now." ... Tice said his information is different from the Terrorist Surveillance Program that Bush acknowledged in December and from news accounts [last] week that the NSA has been secretly collecting phone call records of millions of Americans. "It's an angle that you haven't heard about yet," he said. ... He would not discuss with a reporter the details of his allegations, saying doing so would compromise classified information and put him at risk of going to jail. He said he "will not confirm or deny" if his allegations involve the illegal use of space systems and satellites. ' ---end-cut--- 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Tice