How the NSA Kept Us From Knowing About a Previous, Illegal Domestic Spy Program in 2006

The National Security Agency is engaged in an extensive monitoring of real-time and stored communications of Americans as part of an information-sharing program with Google, Facebook, and other major internet companies. Glenn Greenwald broke the story at The Guardian yesterday based on top-secret documents on a program called PRISM. If you haven’t read his story, or the Washington Post coverage, please do.

What we are seeing now–especially news that NSA is collecting Verizon customer information— is strikingly similar to the scandal over illegal spying by the Bush administration. But as Greenwald shows, these operations have not only continued under the Obama administration, they have expanded.

In light of that, I wanted to highlight a little-known story of how the NSA narrowly averted a similar scandal involving illegal spying on protest groups in 2006.

At that time, members of the Earth Liberation Front were going to trial, as terrorists, for their role in a series of arsons.Â The threat of a life sentence was enough to convince them to snitch on their friends. A few of the defendants refused, though, and were facing even more prison time for not cooperating.

Then the attorneys for these non-cooperating defendants had a brilliant idea. On March 24, 2006, they served prosecutors with a request for all materials obtained through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) or the NSA. The Bush administration NSA scandal was international news. And if the NSA was illegally spying on environmentalists, it could have all the cases thrown out of court.

Here’s an excerpt fromÂ Green Is the New RedÂ about what happened next: