Instructively, these memos were not withdrawn until 2008. However, in moving to suppress Jewell, Obama's Justice Department and their private partners in the telecommunications industry in practice, are continuing the same repressive policies.
As Wired reported back in January, "NSA whistleblower Russell Tice" revealed "that the National Security Agency spied on individual U.S. journalists, entire U.S. news agencies as well as 'tens of thousands' of other Americans."
Tice said on Wednesday that the NSA had vacuumed in all domestic communications of Americans, including, faxes, phone calls and network traffic.
Today [April 13] Tice said that the spy agency also combined information from phone wiretaps with data that was mined from credit card and other financial records. He said information of tens of thousands of U.S. citizens is now in digital databases warehoused at the NSA.
"This [information] could sit there for ten years and then potentially it marries up with something else and ten years from now they get put on a no-fly list and they, of course, won't have a clue why," Tice said.
"In most cases, the person would have no discernible link to terrorist organizations that would justify the initial data mining or their inclusion in the database." (Kim Zetter, "NSA Whistleblower: Wiretaps Were Combined with Credit Card Records of U.S. Citizens," Wired, January 23, 2009)
As George Washington University Law Professor and constitutional scholar, Jonathan Turley, told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on "Countdown" April 7,
“I think right now, the Bush people are bringing out their mission-accomplished sign, because they've not only gotten Obama to protect Bush and Cheney and others from any criminal investigation on torture, but he's now gone even further than they did in the protection of unlawful surveillance. This is the ultimate victory for the Bush officials. They have Barack Obama adopting the same extremist arguments, and in fact exceeding the extremist arguments made by President Bush...
You cannot any longer suggest that President Obama is advancing the civil liberties and the privacy interests that he promised to advance. This is a terrible roll-back. It's a terrible decision.” ("Countdown" with Keith Olbermann, MSNBC, Tuesday, April7, 2009)
And with Congress' passage of the abominable FISA Amendments Act (FAA) last July, handing the NSA carte blanche to continue warrantless spying and driftnet surveillance of Americans, granting grifting telecom giants such as AT&T, Sprint and Verizon get-out-of-jail-free-cards in the form of retroactive immunity for their collusive and wholly illegal activity with NSA and other state agencies, America's post-constitutional new order continues apace. As I reported last September, "the extent of these illegal programs have revealed, the 'enemy' is none other than the American people themselves!"
Three months into the Obama administration, the contours of a new and improved "liberal" police state reveal the same rotten, nidorous core as that of their predecessors. This time around however, the mailed fist of the capitalist state is gussied up with Smiley Face emblems and Hello Kitty stickers.
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