Declassified NSA files show agency spied on Muhammad Ali and MLK

(reading this reminds me of a news story that I heard this morning.  It talked about how about a half dozen current NSA employees were using all of those files and phone numbers to 'spy' on their current love interests.  Did they get fired?  Nope!  But they may be disciplined.  So anyone who thinks that all of this info that the government is collecting, and sharing with other countries around the world, won't ever be used against them---THINK AGAIN!---alexis)

Operation Minaret set up in 1960s to monitor anti-Vietnam critics, branded 'disreputable if not outright illegal' by NSA itself

Muhammad Ali was one of several prominent critics of the Vietnam War the NSA spied on. Photograph: Jane Bown  The National Security Agency secretly tapped into the overseas phone calls of prominent critics of the Vietnam War, including Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali and two actively serving US senators, newly declassified material has revealed.

The NSA has been forced to disclose previously secret passages in its own official four-volume history of its Cold War snooping activities. The newly-released material reveals the breathtaking – and probably illegal – lengths the agency went to in the late 1960s and 70s, in an attempt to try to hold back the rising tide of anti-Vietnam war sentiment.

That included tapping into the phone calls and cable communications of two serving senators – the Idaho Democrat Frank Church and Howard Baker, a Republican from Tennessee who, puzzlingly, was a firm supporter of the war effort in Vietnam. The NSA also intercepted the foreign communications of prominent journalists such as Tom Wicker of the New York Times and the popular satirical writer for the Washington Post, Art Buchwald.

Alongside King, a second leading civil rights figure, Whitney Young of the National Urban League, was also surreptitiously monitored. The heavyweight boxing champion, Muhammad Ali, was put on the watch list in about 1967 after he spoke out about Vietnam – he was jailed having refused to be drafted into the army, was stripped of his title, and banned from fighting – and is thought to have remained a target of surveillance for the next six years.

The agency went to great lengths to keep its activities, known as operation Minaret, from public view. All reports generated for Minaret were printed on plain paper unadorned with the NSA logo or other identifying markings other than the stamp "For Background Use Only". They were delivered by hand directly to the White House, often going specifically to successive presidents Lyndon Johnson who set the programme up in 1967 and Richard Nixon.

The lack of judicial oversight of the snooping programme led even the NSA's own history to conclude that Minaret was "disreputable if not outright illegal".


The new disclosures were prized from the current NSA following an appeal to the Security Classification Appeals Panel by the National Security Archive, an independent research institute based at the George Washington university. "Clearly the NSA didn't want to release this material but they were forced to do so by the American equivalent of the supreme court of freedom of information law," said Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian specialising in the NSA.

http://www.theguardian.com/nsa-surveillance-anti-vietnam