“This is probably the number one commandment of the SIGINT* Ten Commandments as a SIGINT officer: You will not spy on Americans. . . . Everyone at N.S.A. who’s a SIGINT officer knows that you do not do this. Ultimately, so do the leaders of N.S.A., and apparently the leaders of N.S.A. have decided that they were just going to go against the tenets of something that’s a gospel to a SIGINT officer.”

Russell Tice, interview , Democracy Now, 01/03/06

*SIGINT – Signals Intelligence Officer

Position: Intelligence Analyst and Capabilities
Officer, National Security Agency
Tenure: 2002-2005 at NSA; 18 years in Naval Intelligence, Defense Intelligence Agency, and the NSA

In December 2005, the New York Times reported that the National Security Agency (NSA), the largest and most secretive of U.S. intelligence services, was intercepting the phone calls of certain Americans in a top secret project.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 had eliminated NSA’s domestic spying, establishing a secret court to approve surveillance in the U.S. only of suspected foreign agents or terrorists. After 9/11, President Bush issued a secret order allowing the NSA to monitor phone calls and e-mail traffic within the U.S. without a FISA court warrant. Tice, who would later admit to being a source for the story [LINK], was in a position to know. At the NSA, he dealt with Special Access Programs (SAPs), the government’s most tightly guarded “black operations."

In May 2006 news broke that the NSA and major U.S. telecommunications companies were cooperating in a massive program to track phone and e-mail traffic of millions of Americans. At a Senate Armed Services Committee closed session on May 17, 2006 Tice testified on illegalities he says dwarf those already revealed. “[They are] going to be shocked when I tell them what I have to tell them. It’s pretty hard to believe,” he said before the hearing.

Tice had wanted to tell Congress his story since December 2005. But in response to his request to testify before the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, the NSA told him that no one on those committees was cleared to receive the information he wished to convey.

In 2001, Tice reported that he suspected a co-worker of spying for the Chinese. When he reiterated his concerns again in 2003, he was given a psychiatric evaluation that determined he was “paranoid,” and he was dismissed from the agency. Independent evaluations since have pronounced him psychologically fit.

Tice's story has moved Dennis Kucinich and Christopher Shays, the ranking Democrat and the Republican Chairman of the House Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations respectively, to write a letter regarding his case to the Intelligence and Armed Service Committees.