The NSA Has Been Spying on Email and Phone Messages for Many Years

Here is a scoop on a topic I remember from years ago. When I heard the NSA was routinely reviewing phone messages via keyword searches in computers, I wondered how they could or even if they wanted to avoid calls from citizens anywhere in the world. I remember not liking the implications but figured they were snooping on all of us. And here is the proof.
UNDERNEWS

The major media is acting as though Bush's authorization of unconstitutional spying on Americans was something new. This is sadly far from the case and we have that major media to thank for most people not knowing it since papers such as the NY Times and Washington Post did not report the Echelon story except in passing. Here, for example, is something the Review ran in 1998:

PROGRESSIVE REVIEW, JAN 7 1998 - A story in the London Daily Telegraph confirms what TPR and a few other alternative news sources have been reporting for some time: that the National Security Agency routinely eavesdrops on telephone, e-mail and fax communications around the world. A recent report of the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament notes that "within Europe all email telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted by the United States National Security Agency transferring all target information from the European mainland by satellite to Fort Meade in Maryland via the crucial hub at Menwith Hill in the North York moors in the UK."


[...]"Unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the Cold War, ECHELON is designed primarily for non-military targets: governments, organizations and businesses in virtually every country. The ECHELON system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and then siphoning out what is valuable using artificial intelligence aids like MEMEX to find key words."

The Daily Telegraph notes that:

"The NSA, the world's biggest and most powerful signals intelligence organization, received approval to set up a network of spy stations throughout Britain. Their role was to provide military, diplomatic and economic intelligence by intercepting communications from throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The NSA is one of the shadowiest of the US intelligence agencies."

Later that year, we reported:

PROGRESSIVE REVIEW, DECEMBER 22, 1998 - The Washington Post has finally told its readers about NSA's massive electronic spying, but only after the agency itself admitting having 1,056 pages of classified information on the late Princess Diana. Until now, NSA's practice of spying on global communications has been reported largely by alternative media such as the Progressive Review.


Using the sort of sophistry honed by the CIA in its denial of involvement in the drug trade, NSA denied that Diana was ever a "target." Wrote the Post, "The NSA system sucks up millions of electronic signals from around the world every hour, but only 'targeted' communications are actually analyzed and deciphered after a vast array of supercomputers sort them out on the basis of programmed search terms, such as 'Saddam Hussein.'

What Bush did however is routinely access the information to human eyes and administration analysis. I figure that having the information available in undigested form may not violate the law. It's doing something with the information that is illegal.