The story that led the New York Times on Friday, June 7, 2013, and a comparable story on June 6 based on Glenn Greenwald’s articles in the Guardian should not surprise anybody.  The “secrets” that follows in these stories about NSA activities were known by many in the public or at least should have been known.

The first story which covered the government’s access to the telephone records of apparently all Americans was covered extensively in Jim Bamford’s book The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.  I did a TV program with Jim on February 22, 2009 “Is Big Brother Reading Our Emails?” Feb. 22, 2009 which covered every detail in Greenwald’s story.

The second story which is headlined above, is about Prism.  This program covers the monitoring of foreign emails and phone calls when they are connected to a domestic source.  Senators Wyden and Udall have been critical of this program because large quantities of domestic email is monitored by the government.  Technically it appears the government can only rightly monitor such Internet traffic when it is “incidental” to the main purpose which is obtaining access to foreign communication.

This program should come as no surprise to those who remember James Risen story of December 16, 2005 entitled “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts.”  This story was part of a series written by Risen and Lichtblau which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006.  This series became notorious because the New York Times held it for a year after President G. Bush told the Times if it published it, the Times would have “blood on its hands.”  When the Times published the series there was a tremendous furor.  There were many who thought the Times badly damaged national security.

I believe there is very little difference in the story about Prism headlined above and the Risen story of December 16.

What apparently happened after the Risen/Lichtblau series was published was that Bush II continued the program about which Risen wrote and legalized it (actually Congress did this) by requiring the program be taken to the FISA court for approval.  It seems at the same time perhaps, the phone “tapping” program was created.

The government always claims that every leak damages national security but invariably those claims do not turn out to be true.  I have noted previously how this phenomenon played out in the original story by Risen on page 200 of my book Fighting for the Press: the Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles.

It is ironic that Obama, who once criticized the Bush administration for its secret domestic spying program, is now asking for a national debate on a leak of substantially the same information

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