Just as we suspected

by Erin Alecto

By now, many of you may have seen the Russell Tice interview on Keith Olberman's show last night, and are looking forward to his return (we hope) tonight. As we suspected, the NSA was illegally collecting and storing the electronic information of every single American, whether one end was from a foreign country or not. RiderOnTheStorm has a diary up at Daily Kos with a nice summary of the technical aspects as well as a preliminary list of questions that we need answered immediately on the scope of this heinous betrayal of our country by the former president's administration:

1. Who authorized this?

2. Who knew about this?

3. How was this done? Who, among telcos and ISPs, collaborated? Were they served National Security Letters to silence them?

4. Is it still going on?

5. What are all the people and groups who were targeted?

6. Where's the data?

7. Who has had/now has access to the data?

8. What purposes has this data been used for?

I can't imagine now that Tice has made it clear that journalists were a "target" rather than a group that was cleared as "safe," that journalists will pass up another opportunity to make themselves the story. That is, if their monitors didn't find embarrassing tidbits they'd rather not have publicized. I'd be willing to bet we've finally gotten the answer to our eight-year-long question of why the media fell over themselves to ignore and/or excuse Bush and Cheney's criminal behavior.