When the NSA Was Spying on the Congress
I was 27-years-old when I saw the secret tally of American citizens that the National Security Agency had put on their "watch list." It was a list of 1960s civil rights activists, anti-Vietnam War demonstrators and those who organized the Students for a Democratic Society and took to the streets during the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968. Even famous reporters were on the list.
As Claude Raines said in "Casablanca," "Round up the usual suspects." Those of us who were staff members of the Church Committee investigating intelligence agencies back in 1975, we were not totally shocked to see the names – Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, Martin Luther King, Bobby Seale, Muhammad Ali and Tom Wicker, to name just a few of the over 1,600 people.
There were many names we did not recognize – criminals, drug dealers, even old-line suspected communists.
[See a collection of editorial cartoons on the NSA.]
But there were two names we never saw, because they were never given to the Church Committee: Sens. Frank Church and Howard Baker.
New documents just made public by NSA and George Washington University's National Security Archive now reveal that Church, the chairman of the investigative committee and Baker, a member of both the Watergate and Intelligence Committees, were both put on the watch list and their communications were monitored.
NSA's recent report called these actions "disreputable, if not outright illegal."
If NSA had revealed such explosive information in 1975, all hell would have broken loose. So they chose to lie. There were no whistle blowers then, no voices within the Ford administration that revealed such secrets."
* If two United States Senators were not safe over 40 years ago and the most distinguished civil rights leader in our history was not immune, what makes us think that we could be protected by our constitution? We now know, from these disclosures, they weren't."
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/Peter-Fenn/2013/09/27/when-the-nsa-spied-on-the-congress
