Flashback: "60 Minutes" reported on NSA spying back in **2000**

[alp227]

Via Business Insider (with a rather inflammatory headline/photo) is this 60 Minutes report from February 27, 2000 where a companion article by CBS News Online opens: "Everywhere in the world, every day, people's phone calls, emails and faxes are monitored by Echelon, a secret government surveillance network." (http://web.archive.org/web/20000407201701/http://cbsnews.cbs.com/now/story/0,1597,164651-412,00.shtml)

Further excerpt:

"It's not the world of fiction. That's the way it works. I've been there," Frost tells Kroft. "I was trained by you guys," says the former Canadian intelligence agent, referring to the United States' National Security Agency.

The NSA runs Echelon with Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand as a series of listening posts around the world that eavesdrop on terrorists, drug lords and hostile foreign governments.

But to find out what the bad guys are up to, all electronic communications, including those of the good guys, must be captured and analyzed for key words by super computers.

That is a fact that makes Frost uncomfortable, even though he believes the world needs intelligence gathering capabilities like Echelon. "My concern is no accountability and nothing, no safety net in place for the innocent people who fall through the cracks," he tells Kroft.

The CBS article also links to this February 24, 2000 New York Times article "An Electronic Spy Scare Is Alarming Europe".

Although this report has been re-circulated throughout the past decade especially in the wake of the 2005-2006 NSA controversy, no one has posted video of this on YouTube (or CBS probably used copyright ownership to scrub the video).

[nadinbrzezinski]

1. Some of these things started to leak as early as the 1975 Church Committee.

So...

[reteachinwi]

4. There is a continuity since at least WWII

1980s or Before: Database of Potential Enemies Established as Part of Continuity of Government Plan
As a part of the plan to ensure Continuity of Government (COG) in the event of a Soviet nuclear strike or other emergency, the US government begins to maintain a database of people it considers unfriendly. A senior government official who has served with high-level security clearances in five administrations will say it is “a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” He and other sources say that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core, and one says it was set up with help from the Defense Intelligence Agency.

http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=northpromis80

[nadinbrzezinski]

5. Oh absolutely

http://www.eastcountymagazine.org/node/13410

[reteachinwi]

12. Hopefully it starts a conversation on the continual

"state of emergency" since 2001 and the marketing of terror.




In 2007, President Bush issued Presidential Directive NSPD-51, which purported to change Continuity of Government plans. NSPD51 is odd because:

NSPD51 was passed without Congressional input

Even the New York Times wrote in an editorial:
Beyond cases of actual insurrection, the President may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack, or to any ‘other condition.’ Changes of this magnitude should be made only after a thorough public airing. But these new Presidential powers were slipped into the law without hearings or public debate.

Everyone from conservative activist Jerome Corsi to Marjorie Cohn of the [liberal] National Lawyer’s Guild have interpreted [the COG plans contained in Presidential Directive NSPD-51] as a break from Constitutional law ….“

As a reporter for Slate concluded after analyzing NSPD-51:
I see nothing in the [COG document entitled presidential directive NSPD51] to prevent even a “localized” forest fire or hurricane from giving the president the right to throw long-established constitutional government out the window

White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said that “because of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the American public needs no explanation of [Continuity of Government] plans”

http://www.globalresearch.ca/state-of-emergency-and-continuity-of-government-what-is-the-real-reason-the-government-is-spying-on-americans/5338508

[Tx4obama]

2. It should be noted that the rules now under Obama are much differrent than under Bush. n/t

[WovenGems]

3. Nope

Just covers new ways to communicate that the old cowboy forgot to include. Not that the system is proactive in the least. No lead, no way to query the system.

[burnodo]

6. In **2000**??

So why all the hubbub?

[nadinbrzezinski]

7. We have known of some of these things

Echelon leaked in the 1990s to the Observer. It was supposed to be trained externally. After the nd of the Cold War, against us law, it was trained internally.

What is being done now makes both echelon and carnivore look like rank beginners.

It's also illegal and the building of a police state like non before it.

http://www.eastcountymagazine.org/node/13410

I guess there is nothing to see here...and that attitude is a classic that allows this crap to happen.

[burnodo]

10. Should have used my sarcasm tag

My post was snark about the poster assuming that Americans knew all this in 2000

[nadinbrzezinski]

11. My apologies

It's hard to know these days

[bahrbearian]

13. Hee Hee, now here on the DU you never know.

[Catherina]

8. Because Echelon, as bad as it was, and MANY Democrats protested against it,

was nowhere near the scale of Prism.


There's a reason the Prism stuff is classified Top Secret/SI/NoForn

NoForn, btw, means NO foreigners, not even the British. If the British could see it, it would be US/UK Eyes.

[sakabatou]

9. Yup, this isn't new.

[99Forever]

14. Well golly gee willikers...

... then I guess that makes it okay to keep right on doing it even more so, eh alp227?