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that he would conduct the most transparent administration ever. He said on the same day that
Guantanamo would be closed within a year. I noticed that he said yesterday that Guantanamo was going
to be closed this year if Congress cooperates. He has conducted the most secretive administration ever,
and I don’t know why—unless it’s just easier with this universal surveillance to find out who the sources
are. Two of the cases have depended on telephone records that show that so-and-so communicated with a
reporter at the time just before the leak came out. They made a good case.
All of the NSA people that I described (Bill Binney, Kirk Wiebe, Ed Loomis, Tom Drake, along
with Russell Tice) have testified that this mass surveillance is not only unnecessary, but that it contributes
nothing to the finding of terrorists. Under repeated questioning, the president has not been able to come
up with one case where this program, which has gone on now since 2001, has contributed to the finding
of a terrorist or preventing an act. And these NSA people said it should be stopped, it should have been
abandoned. They all said that, from their own experience, they had been mistaken in keeping their
warnings and complaints strictly within channels. They said that Snowden did it right, that that’s the only
way this information would have come out. They haven’t come right out and said, “I wish I were facing
prison,” but they have said that they wanted that information out and the way they used did not succeed.
On the contrary, it confronted them with heavy pressure. Drake was ruined financially by a spurious
prosecution, punishing him for having told Congress this information. His case was virtually thrown out
after he was bankrupt. In fact, after having been a high NSA official with a salary of probably over
$
200,000 a year, he ended up broke by the end of the case. He was defended by public defenders because
he was indigent.
What do we do with this information that we’ve gotten from Snowden? In the long run, how
much does this matter? I’ve told you what can be done, what has been done in the past, and what I’m sure
is being done right now in terms of the blackmail of congresspersons in their voting and in judicial
appointments. Russ Tice has said that he held in his hands at the NSA the private phone records for the
office of future Senator Barack Obama in 2005, who was of national prominence because he had made a
great speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and was being looked at as a presidential
hopeful; the NSA was very interested. I don’t want to name names here unnecessarily, but the point is that
they have this information on everybody. Here’s a question for you. Can you have three independent
branches of government with separate but overlapping powers and oversight capabilities when the
executive branch has every private communication of every member of Congress, every congressional
staffer, every journalist, every source, every potential source, every justice on the Supreme Court—
everybody? Can you really have independence and exercise oversight when you are aware that you and
your staff are subject to that degree of surveillance? I would say no.
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