Press TV has conducted an interview with Scott Rickard, a former American intelligence linguist from Florida, to discuss the controversial US spying program.
The following is an approximate transcript of the interview.

Press TV: How much of a hit has the Obama administration taken over this surveillance or spying program, and why is Obama worried?

Rickard: Well, I wouldn’t call it much of a hit. These kinds of revelations have been coming out for many years. I remember when I first started to discover these types of things in the early 80s, and I was working at the NSA.

James Bamford’s book came out in 1983 and it was a book that we all found very interesting because we all found out things we didn’t know ourselves as we worked there, and they turned out to be absolutely true.

That being said, whether or not he’s taking a hit, I think that he’s being extremely disingenuous with the American people. To say the fact that he was going to put together some form of oversight before the Snowden incident is just completely disingenuous. There would have never been a review board.

Thankful for reporters like Glenn Greenwald, he has good access to mainstream media. He’s one of the few outspoken journalists that does continue to have good access to both BBC and American media.

No, Obama didn’t really take a hit. This guy’s been basically ducking and dodging the truth and misleading the American people for some time now.

Press TV: Obama called for the start of a debate in the court that authorized the surveillance. It appears that this court only receives requests from the government without hearing any counter arguments with which, from what I understand now, is customary in virtually all of the US judiciary. What sort of debate will that be?

Rickard: That’s a great question. I mean, you have to take a clear look at the FISA Court. A lot of the requests don’t even go to FISA, especially real time requests. When they do go to FISA, they get approved within minutes. It’s a matter of a rubber stamp. There’s no oversight.

You have to look at the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, himself comes from the Justice Department of the United States, was very tight with most of the high-level folks who run the Justice Department. For him to be scrutinized by his friends would be highly unlikely.
It’s my opinion that you have the fox watching the henhouse. There is no oversight. There is no accountability. It’s really gone to the point where anything the government likes to do the government is able to do without any accountability or recourse.
Press TV: Of course we’re going to expand on that more. I’m just trying to build a stage here and ask you, I don’t know if you saw the press conference that Obama had yesterday but he said he would ask Congress to reform. This is one of the four things he said: he’s going to reform one of the most controversial sections of the PATRIOT ACT, Section 215. I’m guessing that not many Americans know what that really, really entails. Can you give us an idea of what Section 215 is and the reform that he’s suggested?

Rickard: I cannot, no. I am not very familiar with the PATRIOT ACT from that perspective. But I can guarantee you that many activities that the PATRIOT ACT was fabricated for was basically supporting, really, an administrative nightmare for the American people. This has been an ongoing nightmare since 9/11.

They have instigated quite a bit amount of privacy violations, human right violations against American people based upon the PATRIOT ACT. This is an environment where any type of surveillance is allowed, any type of search and seizure is allowed based upon potential terrorism. They’ve way over, I mean extremely overemphasized the amount of terrorism that we’re dealing with.

You have to take a look at the fact that most people are just responding to the fact that most Americans are continually attacking them. These kinds of legislation and these kinds of policies that the Americans have has really created these kinds of response that they are creating. They’re not out stopping terrorism. They’re out creating terrorism.

You have a society that is being told to be weary of terrorism when terrorism is not something that has just grown organically. Terrorism has grown because people are being tired of getting continuously attacked by the American military industrial complex. They’re the ones that are writing the rules and the legislations for the American people. The American people are just eating it up on the news and the misinformation that they’re getting from their government.

Press TV: Again, Scott Rickard, I don’t know if you saw that press conference but I’m trying to break down some of the things that he said he’s going to do: some of the reforms he said, an overhaul of the - not an overhaul but starting a website that describes intelligence activities and appoint a board of outside experts who’ll look more closely at surveillance programs and issue a report by the end of the year. Some are saying, ‘come on, Obama, you could do a little better than that, having these two as part of your efforts there and explaining how much surveillance is actually occurring’. What was your reaction to some of these proposals that Obama says he’s going to enact?

Rickard: The guy is really - I cannot disagree with [previous guest speaker] Carol, she’s absolutely correct. [Obama] was just being careful. He’s just tiptoeing, trying continually not to upset the status quo. The fact is that I really don’t believe anything that this guy says any longer.
It’s been going on - he’s certainly the epitome of George Bush. The only difference is that he has a different education and a different background. The fact is that his policies are very much the same. His disingenuous, misleading information that he feeds the American people is very much the same. We don’t have clear leadership. We do have a lot of people that are dancing around the truth.
The truth of the matter is that we do have a society that’s been highly surveilled for some time now. You had the Hoover guys. You had everyone involved in the 50s and 60s just building up an entire infrastructure, collecting intelligence against the Americans.

The fact is that it’s just gotten a lot more technological. We are tracked everywhere we go. Everyone’s carrying around their own personal recording devices. Everybody is locatable by GPS. Every purchase they make, if they’re using any kind of credit card information, everything that they’re purchasing is known. The things that they’re Googling on Amazon is known. Everything, every website they’ve visited is known.

It’s a lot worse than it used to be and the nation is very easily attainable. That’s the kind of thing that Snowden is really making more of a revelation, where people like me have been talking about this for over a decade but we’re considered a tinfoil hat.

The fact is that now you’ve got somebody in the mainstream media who’s saying things that are definitely making sense. The technology does provide a much better capability to keep an eye on us and the government’s not being honest with us at the same time.
Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them

Press TV: Let me now say why Obama is not being sincere, I mean, in a manner of speaking. This is something picked up in an interview with PBS: the National Security Agency, who this former official stated this in an interview, his name is Russell Tycho, I believe, and he said when asked about collecting everything, “all content, word for word, everything, every domestic communication in the entire country is being picked up.”

There was another gentleman in that interview, former NSA technical leader, he said there was a place called the Utah Data Center, called the ‘Bumblehive’, “so big and wide in scope that you can store 100 years of the world’s communication at the center.”

Why doesn’t Obama, now that the cat’s out of the bag, tell America and the world how extensive this spying system, surveillance program, etcetera, is?

Rickard: Definitely, there’s a giant surveillance network going on. Out in Utah they’re building one of the largest storage facilities to store 100 years worth of communications. Every single phone call, every single email, every single transaction is being stored. Now, is it being monitored? No. But it’s being stored so that they can go back and look in case something happens, so there’s historical data.

Now that, in my opinion, is definitely Orwellian. It’s far beyond anything Nazi Germany or Stalin or Lenin could have ever imagined. It’s certainly a treasure trove of information for anyone who has access to it and uses it in any way they deem legal.

That’s where I think the disingenuous portion with American people lie, that it’s not legal. A lot of the things that they’re doing with the information is very illegal. The activities of the Americans involved in, they’ve been illegal for decades.

I’ve seen guys like Semion Mogolevich, who has laundered 6 billion dollars to the Bank of New York with the CIA. Guys that I’ve worked with that have returned states’ evidence against Iran contra back in the 80s that was just swept under the rug by the Department of Justice.

So, there’s many, many things that have happened illegally that are basically hidden from the American people as national security interests, and they have nothing to do with national security. All they’re doing is hiding criminal activity, hiding war crimes, hiding drug crimes, hiding financial crimes by a myriad of people. It crosses every single party, every single country. It is horrific what the Americans, the British, the French and the other leaders of this world have done over the past 50 years.

Press TV: In conclusion, Scott Rickard, it seems like there is a concern for the Obama administration including Obama to come out making these press statements. Do you think that there’s going to be a backlash from average Americans regarding what is occurring if this news just keeps rolling and snowballing and, of course, we never know what’s going to happen with Snowden and his revelations?

Rickard: I would hope so but unfortunately the Americans have shown themselves to be quite apathetic. Most of the people that live in Western societies, because of the financial luxuries that they’ve been living under for so long, and it’s really been a façade of financial success - just as Carol described, her pensions are being withheld from her, that she earned rightfully so, for another half decade now, she won’t receive those.

What the root of the problem is, it’s not the amount of money spent on spying, because it’s quite large - don’t get me wrong, there’s probably trillions of dollars spent on it, no doubt - but at the same time there’s trillions of dollars being spent on an unnecessary military industrial complex. The same thing’s being spent on unnecessary financial, what I’ll say, ‘finagling’.

So, what has to happen in order to solve these problems, you have to attack the root. I’ve said this many times, the root of the problem is the financial markets that really control the militaries.

Governments don’t die, people do, and the governments will still be here when you and I are long gone, and they’ll continue to operate the way that they’re operating unless the people rise up like the Commonwealth Wars in the 1700s across Europe and the United States.

By Press TV

 

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