President Bush has admitted that he gave orders that allowed the NSA to eavesdrop on a small number of Americans without the usual requisite warrants.

But Tice disagrees. He says the number of Americans subject to eavesdropping by the NSA could be in the millions if the full range of secret NSA programs is used.

"That would mean for most Americans that if they conducted, or you know, placed an overseas communication, more than likely they were sucked into that vacuum," Tice said.

The same day The New York Times broke the story of the NSA eavesdropping without warrants, Tice surfaced as a whistleblower in the agency. He told ABC News that he was a source for the Times' reporters. But Tice maintains that his conscience is clear.

"As far as I'm concerned, as long as I don't say anything that's classified, I'm not worried," he said. "We need to clean up the intelligence community. We've had abuses, and they need to be addressed."

Are you allowed to leak government secrets to expose an illegal act?

No. According to federal whistle-blower protection law, members of the intelligence community are not protected if they divulge classified information to anyone without the proper security clearance, even if they think they have evidence of a crime. They can, however, pass along what they know to higher-ups and internal auditors within the bureaucracy without fear of retaliation. Provided they go through the proper channels, they can also spill the beans to a member of Congress who has the appropriate clearance.

If identified, the Times' leakers might argue that the information they divulged was improperly classified. Executive Order 13292, which covers secret national-security information, says that nothing can be classified so as to "conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error." With this in mind, they might claim that the domestic wiretap information wasn't actually secret, since it had been classified incorrectly.

Executive Order 13292 also says that if you're authorized to have classified information and that you, "in good faith, believe its classification status is improper," you are "encouraged and expected to challenge the classification status." That means that you should pass along your concern to higher-ups or an appeals panel, without fear of retribution. Federal employees also have a general obligation to pass along evidence of official misconduct through official channels. … This obligation wouldn't apply to leaks to the press unless the information had been improperly classified.

National security whistle-blowers are rarely brought up on criminal charges, since it's very hard for the government to prove that a leaker intended to break the law. (Only one official has ever been convicted of leaking classified information to the press.) The whistle-blowers are more likely to face administrative sanctions—they might lose their security clearance, for example, or get fired.

What he should have done was bring his complaint to his Senator or Representative, which would have avoided the crime of disclosing classified information.

"The NSA confirmed, because of a FOIA request I filed, that indeed it has files on peace and justice groups," Obuszewiski said. "However, the Agency is refusing to release the information unless I pay $1,915. What might be in these files?"

A second NSA document on the letterhead of the National Security Agency Police and authored by NSA Police Major Michael E. Talbert is dated Oct. 3, 2004. It is an action plan for the "threat of a demonstration hosted by a group known as Pledge of Resistance - Baltimore." They note the demonstration is part of the "Keep Space for Peace Week." The NSA action plan includes plans for four days, but six activities being planned by the NSA before the day of the demonstration have been redacted.

The NSA electronic spying should also be considered in conjunction with the NSA surveillance of protest groups.  (See this Raw Story Article). This particular group was associated with the Quakers (a huge threat to national security).

The National Security Agency advised President Bush in early 2001 that it had been eavesdropping on Americans during the course of its work monitoring suspected terrorists and foreigners believed to have ties to terrorist groups, according to a declassified document.

The NSA's vast data-mining activities began shortly after Bush was sworn in as president and the document contradicts his assertion that the 9/11 attacks prompted him to take the unprecedented step of signing a secret executive order authorizing the NSA to monitor a select number of American citizens thought to have ties to terrorist groups.

~snip~

What had long been understood to be protocol in the event that the NSA spied on average Americans was that the agency would black out the identities of those individuals or immediately destroy the information.

But according to people who worked at the NSA as encryption specialists during this time, that's not what happened. On orders from Defense Department officials and President Bush, the agency kept a running list of the names of Americans in its system and made it readily available to a number of senior officials in the Bush administration, these sources said, which in essence meant the NSA was conducting a covert domestic surveillance operation in violation of the law.

Former President Clinton said Thursday that he never ordered wiretaps of American citizens without obtaining a court order, as President Bush has acknowledged he has done.

Clinton, in an interview broadcast Thursday on the ABC News program ''Nightline,'' said his administration either received court approval before authorizing a wiretap or went to court within three days after to get permission, as required by law.

'We either went there and asked for the approval or, if there was an emergency and we had to do it beforehand, then we filed within three days afterward and gave them a chance to second guess it,'' Clinton told ABC.

Why would eavesdropping on the conversations and communications of foreigners who have declared their intent to kill us be a violation of our rights?

'We either went there and asked for the approval or, if there was an emergency and we had to do it beforehand, then we filed within three days afterward and gave them a chance to second guess it,'' Clinton told ABC.

Let’s see what the extent of the listening is.  I am with Bush and support the listening to overseas calls made by folks we have reason to suspect would hurt us.

(Amlord)
That doesn't look like NSA spying to me. It looks like a police report stemming from the fact that the group was going to protest the NSA. It keeps referencing NSA Police Operations---i.e. security.

Documents turned over by the NSA indicate that the group was closely monitored. In one instance, the agency filed reports approximately every 15 minutes from 9:30 AM to 3:18 PM on the day of a demonstration at the National Vigilance Airplane Memorial on the NSA Campus in Maryland.

According to an NSA email dated July 4, 2004, the agency collected license numbers and descriptions and the number of people in each car and filed a report about them gathering in a church parking lot for the demonstration. NSA agents also logged their travel to the demonstration, including stopping as a gas station along the way. A canine dog unit was used to search a minivan when it was stopped on the way to the demonstration - nothing was found.

NSA officials even reported on the balloons being inflated for the demonstration and the content of their signs