Whistleblower: NSA Spied on Obama in 2004

A former agent for the National Security Agency claims that back in 2004, he was privy to orders to wiretap the phones of then-Senator Obama, reports Business Insider.

Appearing last week on the radio program, “The Boiling Frogs Show,” Russ Tice, who worked for the agency from 2002 to 2005, said he was in possession of the order to wiretap Obama’s phones.

“In the summer of 2004, one of the papers that I held in my hand was to wiretap a bunch of numbers associated with a 40-some-year-old senator from Illinois,” Tice said.

“You wouldn't happen to know where that guy lives now would you? It's a big White House in Washington D.C. That's who the NSA went after. That's the President of the United States now.”

Tice claimed he also saw orders to perform the same surveillance on Hillary Clinton, Senators John McCain, R-Ariz., and Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, Gen. David Petraeus, and a current Supreme Court justice.

Tice said the NSA’s fracturing of the rules that govern domestic spying is widespread and deep.

“The abuse is rampant and everyone is pretending that it's never happened, and it couldn't happen,” Tice said.

“I know [there was abuse] because I had my hands on the papers for these sorts of things: They went after high-ranking military officers; they went after members of congress — Senate and the House — especially on the intelligence committees and the armed services committees, lawyers, law firms, judges, State Department officials, part of the White House, multinational companies, financial firms, NGOs, civil rights groups...”

Tice said that while the NSA wasn’t technically able to collect everything when he was an agent, a current source confirmed to him that increased capabilities allow the spy agency to copy “every domestic communication in this country, word for word, content, every phone conversation, every email — they are collecting everything in bulk and putting it in databases.”

This is not the first time Tice has played the role of whistleblower.

The Huffington Post reports that in 2005, he came forward with information that he alleged showed massive unconstitutional domestic spying across multiple agencies.