Christopher Pyle, who first exposed domestic spying in the 1970s here in the U.S. Pyle discovered the CIA was spying on millions of Americans engaged in lawful activity while he was in the Army and worked as an instructor. After he left, he wrote about the Armys vast and growing spy operations. His article from 1971 began, “For the past four years, the U.S. Army has been closely watching civilian political activity within the United States.” Pyles story prompted Senate hearings, including Senator Frank Churchs Select Committee on Intelligence. These ultimately led to a series of laws aimed at curbing government abuse.
Christopher Pyle talking:
I received a briefing at the U.S. Army Intelligence Command that showed me the extent of the surveillance system. There were about 1,500 Army agents in plain clothes watching every demonstration in the United States of 20 people or more. There was also a records system in a giant warehouse on about six million people. I disclosed the existence of that surveillance and then recruited 125 of the Armys counterintelligence agents to tell what they knew about the spying to Congress, the courts and the press. As a result of those disclosures and the congressional hearings, the entire U.S. Army Intelligence Command was abolished. This was before Watergate.
Two things happened. The Army created a 50-man unit in the Pentagon whose sole job was to discredit my disclosures. That effort failed: The disclosures were all quite accurate. I was also put on President Nixons enemies list, which resulted in a tax audit.
Church Committees special Senate investigation of government misconduct, which you played a key role in the mid-’70s, U.S. Senate committee chaired by Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho, who conducted a massive investigation of the CIA and FBI’s misuse of power at home and abroad, the multi-year investigation examining domestic spying, the CIAs attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, the FBI and CIAs efforts to infiltrate and disrupt leftist organizations, and a lot more.
what weve seen in the ensuing years has been a vast explosion in intelligence-gathering capabilities. But the most significant part of that is the fact that civilian corporations are now doing the governments work. Seventy percent of the intelligence budget of the United States today goes to private contractors like Booz Allen, which employed Edward Snowden. This is a major change in the power of surveillance. It now goes not only to the government, but to private corporations.
The forerunner of the PRISM system that Snowden disclosed was called Trailblazer. It wasted $1 billion on private contracts. It replaced a much less expensive system called ThinThread, which had more privacy protections and had been developed inside the government. Now, the reason that private contractors get this business is because members of Congress intercede with them with government agencies. And we now have a situation where members of the Intelligence Committee and other committees of Congress intercede with the bureaucracy to get sweetheart contracts for companies that waste taxpayers money and also violate the Constitution and the privacy of citizens. This is a very serious situation, because it means that its much more difficult to get effective oversight from Congress.
we all want to protect the security of the country. We all want to protect the Constitution. But when government agencies are totally unaccountable, we cant do that. Members of Congress do not go to those briefings, even if theyre offered, because once you go to the briefing, then you cant talk about what youve been told, because its classified. So the briefing system is designed to silence Congress, not to promote effective oversight.
Members of Congress dont want to spend time on oversight. Theyre too busy raising money. New members of the House of Representatives this winter were told by the Democratic Campaign Committee that they should spend between four and six hours a day dialing for dollars. They have no time to do the publics business. Theyre too busy begging for money. President Obama himself attended 220 fundraisers last year. Where does he get the time to be president when hes spending so much time asking wealthy people for money to support his campaign?
NSA doesnt want to hire people like you and me. We dont know enough about the Internet. That said, its important to note that the vice chairman of Booz Allen happens to be Mike McConnell, who was former director of NSA and of national intelligence. There is a revolving door between high government positions and private corporations, and this revolving door allows these people to make a great deal more money upon leaving the government, and then being rented back to the government in a contractor capacity. And thats part of the corruption of the system.
The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which protects us from unreasonable searches and seizures, only binds the government, doesnt bind corporations. Thats a serious problem. The reason we have privatization of prisons, in some ways, is for governments to escape liability. They put the liability on the private corporations that run the prisons, and they just charge their liabilities as an operating cost.
when I was blowing the whistle and they couldnt get any dirt on meI had led a very uninteresting lifethey made up dirt and tried to peddle it on Capitol Hill in order to discredit me and prevent me from testifying before Senator Ervins Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights. Every bureaucracy hates dissenters. They must expel dissenters and discredit dissenters, because dissenters force them to reconsider what it is theyre doing, and no bureaucracy wants anybody to interrupt what theyre doing. And so, this is the natural, organic response of any bureaucracy or any establishment.
Now, I think it is inappropriate and quite irrelevant to analyze Ed Snowdens motivations. It doesnt matter muchexcept in court, to prove that he either did or did not intend to aid a foreign power or hurt the United States. But separate from that motivation, whether hes a narcissist, like many people on television are, no, I dont think thats relevant at all. Hes neither a traitor nor a hero, and he says this himself. Hes just an ordinary American. Hes trying to start a debate in this nation over something that is critically important. He should be respected for that, taken at face value, and then we should move on to the big issues, including the corruption of our system that is done by massive secrecy and by massive amounts of money in politics.
– source democracynow.org
Chris Pyle, author of four books. His most recent is Getting Away with Torture. In 1970, he disclosed the militarys spying on civilian politics and worked for three congressional committees to end it, including Senator Frank Churchs Select Committee on Intelligence. He teaches constitutional law and civil liberties at Mount Holyoke College.