The Intercept is reporting that the NSA is unsurprisingly spying on countless American citizens without there being any reasonable justification for doing so. This is being reported based on the documents that Edward Snowden gave Glenn Greenwald including a “FISA recap” spreadsheet that details thousands of email addresses being monitored. Out of those email accounts being monitored, 202 addresses were marked as US persons, while 1,782 were marked as non-US persons and 5,501 were marked as unknown or simply left blank. The Intercept identified five Americans on the list from their email addresses and helped build the story that we’re reporting on today.

The NSA is monitoring the emails (and likely more) of multiple Muslim-Americans even though they have never had any ties to any terrorist groups or anti-American sentiment. There was, however, one lawyer involved in the spying on Americans who represented clients in terrorism cases, but that is merely a breach of due process. A breach where the NSA could pass on confidential information to the prosecution and help create a case where there is none. Obviously, such lawyers would probably suspect that they’re already being watched, but not by the NSA. Even so, he is one of five Americans basically put on a ‘watch list’ for who they are and what they do, not a justification for being spied on as an American.

The five Americans that are being spied on were discovered in Edward Snowden’s leaked NSA documents. These five men, that are Americans, Faisal Gill, Asim Ghafoor, Hooshang Amirahmadi, Agha Saeed and Nihad Awad are all obviously people that could easily be considered Muslim Americans. But the fact is that with the exception of Asim Ghafoor, none of these men have ANY remote ties with terrorists in any way, shape, or form. In fact, Asim Ghafoor only does because its part of his job as a lawyer to represent them, which is still an American thing to do in order to ensure due process.

FISA Recap Spreadsheet

These men’s email addresses were found in a FISA recap spreadsheet which basically broke down who was and wasn’t being spied on and whether or not their account owners were American, non-American or unknown. Unfortunately for all of us Americans, it doesn’t really seem to make much of a difference whether or not people are American if the NSA really wants to spy on them. Because the truth is that the FISA courts are basically granting the NSA any and all permissions that they need to ‘do their job’. In the 35 years that the FISA court (FISC) has been in existence, the court has approved 35,434 government requests for surveillance, while rejecting only 12. Giving you merely a small idea of how strictly these requests are really being ‘judged’.

What’s worse is that some of these men have grown up and served their country, like Faisal Gill, who has served in the military and worked for the White House under President George W. Bush. In fact, he was a staunch supporter of the Republican party and their ideals. He also did lots of work under the Department of Homeland security and after he was done working there, the NSA spied on him, while George W. Bush was still president. In fact, after he left the Department of Homeland security, where he had very high level security clearance, the spying on him began.

The Intercept interviewed some of these men to talk about the spying and their experiences, and there are some really powerful words being said, especially towards the end.

The problem with all of this is that our government, The NSA, the FBI and the FISA courts that enable them are really toeing a very dangerous line. If it is okay to spy on American citizens with basically no supporting evidence (as it appears that these men were) then what prevents the NSA, CIA, FBI and other government agencies from monitoring everything we do, waiting until we trip up?

Just because these men are Muslim-Americans should not mean that they are suddenly dangerous to Americans and our freedom. In fact, singling them out because of what religion they are might be one of the most grave transgressions the NSA has committed so far. We already know that the NSA is spying on people that use Tor, so who’s next? Tor Users, American Muslims… Communists? Chinese-American Immigrants? Mexican-Americans? Where does it end?

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As we come closer and closer to Edward Snowden’s interview tonight with none other than Brian Williams of NBC, Glenn Greenwald has said (while promoting his new book) that he will be publishing a list of Americans (likely high profile individuals) that are being spied upon by the NSA. This list of NSA targets that are American citizens (something the NSA cannot really do without specific permission) will likely open up exactly who the NSA is spying on in terms of people inside the US. We will discover what kinds of groups they’re targeting and where those people come from as well, and it will likely make the NSA look a lot worse than they already do with the American public. After all, the people of Aghanistan and The Bahamas probably aren’t very happy with the NSA either once they found out that all of their calls were being recorded by the NSA.

Additionally, I have a very strong feeling that many of the Americans that the NSA is spying on are probably the very people that are cooperating with them, including the employees of 80-some companies that are cooperating with them, according to a recent Wikileaks disclosure. Greenwald also said that the NSA’s data security isn’t necessarily the greatest when you consider that Edward Snowden had successfully stolen 1.7 million files from their systems and was not caught  during his entire process. This alone should be a grave worry of anyone that believes that the NSA should be allowed to capture and then warehouse billions of records across the world, including those of American citizens. Ultimately, the NSA should not be trusted to the degree that they are today and that there should be more oversight of the agency, more than the recently passed USA Freedom Act which was gutted the day before it was passed in order to give the US security apparatus more freedoms than were originally intended in the bill.

Glenn Greenwald hasn’t given a specific date or time when he will release these names, but there’s a good chance he’ll do it after Edward Snowden’s interview with Brian Williams airs on NBC tonight. This will be the first interview that Edward Snowden has with any American network since his disclosures of NSA spying last year and will be aired at 10pm/9pm central on NBC. While we don’t know the details of that interview, we can assume that it’ll probably rehash a lot of things that have already been disclosed and won’t likely talk much about any new disclosures since Snowden has left many of those to be released by journalists. Although don’t forget, Brian Williams is a journalist and there’s a good chance we could hear something new during that interview, we simply don’t know what Snowden wants to say about the NSA directly to the American public.

Either way, this week sounds like it should pan out to be pretty interesting if both Snowden and Greenwald release new info.

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According to the latest release by Wikileaks, the NSA is recording all calls coming in and out of Afghanistan. They reported this even though other publications and journalists strictly opposed to releasing the name of Afghanistan in their disclosures that the NSA was recording all calls in the Bahamas. Under a week ago, The Intercept (Glenn Greenwald and co.) along with Wikileaks and a few other publications had disclosed that all cellular calls were being recorded by the NSA and that there was another country that had yet to be named that was getting a similar treatment. However, The Intercept refused to publish the name of the second country for fear that it would cause actual and gave harm to people’s lives if that country’s name were to be released.

However, Wikileaks did not agree with The Intercept and The Washington Post on the Afghanistan topic and chastised them publicly on Twitter for not wanting to disclose the name of the second target country, even though Wikileaks did not believe that the truth should be withheld or that knowing the truth would actually affect anyone’s lives or put anyone in danger. The Washington Post and The Intercept both chose to withhold the name of the second country but really, it seems quite pointless to have done so if Wikileaks was already going to release that information. Additionally, I don’t quite understand how The Intercept and The Washington Post necessarily rationalized that releasing Afghanistan’s name would somehow endanger lives. If anything, it would merely result in the US being pushed out of Afghanistan sooner rather than later, which is already an inevitability as it is already.

Not to mention, the Afghani people have the full right to know that the US is effectively spying on all of their cellular communications without their consent. They are already living with a heavy US military presence but in addition to that, everything they’re doing is effectively being monitored by the NSA and likely passed on to the military and CIA who are partaking in drone strikes. Overall, this information is certainly not surprising, but it is still quite worrying that the NSA is capable of spying on an entire country’s cellular communications and record every bit of it as well. Also don’t forget that the NSA is also collecting metadata on people in Mexico, Kenya and the Philippines as well. None of this is surprising, but the sad part is that the NSA is allowed to continue to violate people’s electronic privacy in the name of ‘national security’.

It will be interesting, however, to see how the US’ dipolmatic relations and military engagements with the aforementioned countries will be as a result of this disclosure. No, I don’t think people’s lives are in danger, just the political climate is a bit more difficult than it was a few days ago.

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