If you found Snowden's allegations disturbing, listen to Russ Tice

In 2005, long before we heard from Edward Snowden about the NSA spying on Americans, Russ Tice alleged that massive domestic spying was going on. According to Tice, the intelligence community ordered surveillance of high-ranking military officials, lawmakers and diplomats.
As a former intelligence analyst for the U.S. Air Force, Office of Naval Intelligence, Defense Intelligence Agency and the NSA, Tice would be in a position to know.
Tice is now speaking up about the downplaying and denial in official responses to Snowden’s revelations, and providing details that show the depth of the NSA’s surveillance. I transcribed one particularly disturbing portion of the interview that begins around the 10-minute mark:

I just got the confirmation this past Saturday that yes – it is everything. NSA is copying every domestic communication in this country, word for word, content in every phone conversation, like the one we’re having now, every e-mail – everything. They are collecting everything in bulk and they are putting it in databases, and ultimately that facility out there in Utah is already online – and they haven’t even said that. But they’re putting stuff there now, even though they’re supposedly not going to open that thing up until later on this fall. That thing is sort of like the Death Star, where, in Star Wars, they said it was only halfway done or whatever but they had the capability to blow up another Alderaan or something. But that “Death Star” in Utah is already starting to function – to store every communication in this country, word for word. Content.
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I think Tice is telling the truth. And as bad as it is that the NSA is storing all our would-be private conversations, the possibility – probability – that their tentacles are around every politician and political candidate is far worse than their knowing where Joe Smith eats lunch, or with whom Jane Jones spends her Friday nights.
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