NSA documents that were declassified this week show that the agency—which has come under increased scrutiny for its dragnet surveillance practices—heavily surveilled and tapped the phones of high-profile critics of the Vietnam War, including Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, and two U.S. senators including Idaho Democrat Frank Church.
These revelations raise the obvious question: If the NSA was targeting people like Sen. Frank Church, who were in a position to oversee the NSA—is that happening now?
They were joined on the NSA’s “watch list” by roughly 1,600 other prominent war critics whose overseas phone calls, telexes and cables were monitored.
While Vietnam-era spying on U.S. citizens, conducted under the codename Operation Minaret, was known at the time, the targets of this surveillance were not public until now.
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The documents were forced to be declassified this week following an appeal to the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP) by an independent research institute, the National Security Archive.
Kevin Gosztola at FireDogLake reports Thursday, the documents, which comprise of the NSA’s own multi-volume history of the agency, show that the Minaret project “employed unusual procedures.”
“For example,” Gosztola writes, “the NSA did not use the ‘usual serialization’ to distribute the reports. The reports were made to look like human intelligence reports instead of signals intelligence reports.”
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