US Has Spied On Its Citizens For Years...While Ignoring Many Real Enemies

The NSA, FBI and CIA have been doing this sort of thing as long as they've been in existence. In 1984 while I wrote at CNN, the NSA regularly threatened people about what could be reported. And they ignored knowledge that certain Republicans had loose lips about our missile testing. We were simply told not to report them in the name of National Security. The only way we knew we were being spied on by the NSA was that we would receive a call from time to time, and how else would they have known but by spying on our computers, phone calls or possibly inside agents?

In one such case a Republican Senator at a Washington party divulged… okay, he was bragging about, false missile bursts in Leavenworth that indicated Soviet technology wasn’t what we feared. In fact, according to him, we had on several occasions performed such tests that were designed to see if the Soviets would scramble jets in preparation for missile attack. Apparently, if detected, they would have thought missiles were only minutes away. In most cases they didn’t even notice until our missiles would have landed.

This was clearly sensitive information that at the time needed to remain classified. In other cases we were told not to report things that were simply politically embarrassing. Usually, we ignored these warnings.

FDR ordered similar things too, but with current technology, they are literally harvesting millions of emails and telephone conversations, filtering them for words like "I oppose the war" then putting people on lists. Below is an interesting read of similar things in our nation’s domestic spying history.

History of Domestic Surveillance