NSA has been spying on our phones for at least two decades

The media is handling the NSA phone spying story only in regards to the Patriot Act. In fact, as the Progressive Review reported at the time, massive NSA phone spyng has been going on for at least two decades. Here is a story we published in March:

Progressive Review, March 2015 - We were interested to see a story in Intercept that noted:

Near the heartland of New Zealand’s renowned wine country, there is a place that visitors are not allowed to go. The peculiar large white domes that protrude from the earth in the Waihopai Valley are surrounded by razor wire and shrouded in secrecy.

But now, newly revealed documents from the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden shine a light on what is behind the security perimeter. The buildings there are crammed with sophisticated NSA spying technology, used by New Zealand to sweep up text messages, emails, phone calls, and other communications in bulk across the Asia-Pacific.

The documents, revealed Saturday by the Sunday Star-Times in collaboration with The Intercept, show how closely New Zealand has worked with the NSA to maintain surveillance coverage of the region.

The Progressive Review first started reporting on the NSA's offshore spying on Americans nearly two decades ago. A few samples:

Progressive Review, 1997 - An important story behind the story of Whitewater is the increasing role of intelligence agencies. It appears that the FBI, CIA and NSA are all involved with institutional agendas that greatly muddy an already complex saga.

For example, some of the information concerning Chinese efforts to buy and exercise influence over American politics seems to have come from NSA intercepts of telephone calls carried out by listening posts such as those in England and New Zealand, which the agency uses to evade US wiretap laws. The NSA apparently also has a large file on Vincent Foster for unexplained reasons.

The CIA has taken an unprecedented interest in a collection of files at the SBA related to the Clinton's China trade. So important are these files that when a congressional investigator with a top secret clearance came to check them out, he was told he couldn't. A congressional source told the Washington Times that "the documents are so classified that we were not allowed to look at them. They were taken from Commerce to the SBA, and there has been no explanation to date on how or why that occurred."

Progressive Review, 1998  - The Washington Post has finally told its readers about NSA's massive electronic spying, but only after the agency itself admitting having 1,056 pages of classified information on the late Princess Diana. Until now, NSA's practice of spying on global communications has been reported largely by alternative media such as the Progressive Review.

Using the sort of sophistry honed by the CIA in its denial of involvement in the drug trade, NSA denied that Diana was ever a "target." Wrote the Post, "The NSA system sucks up millions of electronic signals from around the world every hour, but only 'targeted' communications are actually analyzed and deciphered after a vast array of supercomputers sort them out on the basis of programmed search terms, such as 'Saddam Hussein.'

Last January, the European Parliament reported that all "e-mail, telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted by the United States National Security Agency" by a system called Echelon. The operation is carried out in Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, because American law doesn't permit it on US soil. NSA claims it does not monitor American conversations. 

Said the report: "Each of the five [countries] supply 'dictionaries' to the other four of keywords, phrases, people and places to 'tag,' and the tagged intercept is forwarded straight to the requesting country," according to the report."

News of the Diana file came out after a Freedom of Information request was made of the agency. While admitting it had the files, NSA denied the request because "because their disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security."

Sunday Times, 2000  -  Spy agencies in Britain and America eavesdropped on Diana, Princess of Wales and Mark Thatcher, son of the former prime minister, as part of a global system of monitoring communications, according to former intelligence officials . . . The officials also revealed that charities such as Amnesty International, Christian Aid and Greenpeace were secretly spied on. Overseas targets have even included the Vatican: messages sent by the Pope and the late Mother Teresa of Calcutta have been intercepted, read and passed on to Whitehall intelligence officers, the sources say.

Code named Echelon, the monitoring system is part of a worldwide network of listening stations capable of processing millions of messages an hour. At least 10 Echelon stations operate around the world. Canada, Australia and New Zealand participate, as well as Britain and the United States. Former intelligence officials have spoken out after a decision by the European parliament to launch an inquiry into Echelon's operations. Officially, the British and American governments continue to deny the network's existence. Wayne Madsen, who worked for 20 years at America's National Security Agency and other agencies, said last week: "Anybody who is politically active will eventually end up on the NSA's radar screen"  . . .

"I just think of Echelon as a great vacuum cleaner in the sky which sucks everything up," said Mike Frost, a former Canadian intelligence officer. "We just get to look at the goodies." Frost, who retired in 1992 after 20 years' service, has also revealed that Canada's equivalent of GCHQ was used by Margaret Thatcher to monitor two cabinet colleagues. "She wanted to find out not what they were saying," Frost said, "but what they were thinking"  . . .