Jimmy Carter Uses Snail Mail To Evade NSA As He Is Sure That The NSA Is Spying On His E-Mail
By Countercurrents
24 March 2014
Countercurrents.org
Former US president Jimmy Carter believes US intelligence agencies are spying on him — so much so, he eschews email to avoid government spies.
“You know, I have felt that my own communications are probably monitored,” Carter told NBC's Andrea Mitchell in an interview broadcast Sunday. “And when I want to communicate with a foreign leader privately, I type or write a letter myself, put it in the post office and mail it.
“I believe if I send an email, it will be monitored,” Carter continued.
Reports by media including AFP and Huffington Post said:
The 89-year-old said the NSA and others have abused the argument that gathering intelligence is critical to homeland security.
“That has been extremely liberalized and, I think, abused by our own intelligence agencies,” Carter said.
Carter has admitted he uses snail mail to evade monitoring by the NSA and that he feels such surveillance methods have been abused.
A trove of documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has sparked outrage in the United States and abroad about the vast capabilities of America 's intelligence programs.
Officials have defended the methods as necessary to thwart terror attacks but President Barack Obama has ordered reforms in the wake of the disclosures.
Carter has previously expressed support for Edward Snowden, the former government contractor who leaked documents on the NSA's controversial surveillance programs.
“He's obviously violated the laws of America , for which he's responsible, but I think the invasion of human rights and American privacy has gone too far,” Carter said in an interview with CNN last June. “I think that the secrecy that has been surrounding this invasion of privacy has been excessive, so I think that the bringing of it to the public notice has probably been, in the long term, beneficial.”
The former president later said the United States ' democracy had been compromised by the spying.
“ America does not at the moment have a functioning democracy,” Carter said at an event in Atlanta in July.
‘NSA can retrieve, replay phone calls'
Based on leaked documents an AFP report on March 18, 2014 said:
The NSA has technology capable of recording all the phone calls of an entire country and replaying them later.
The Washington Post, citing documents leaked by Snowden, said the technology functions like a time machine by being able to reach into the past.
The report said the NSA can collect 100 percent of the calls of a target country and reach as far back as one month with the tools called MYSTIC and RETRO.
The leaked documents say the tools can “retrieve audio of interest that was not tasked at the time of the original call.”
The Post said that at the request of US officials, it withheld details that could be used to identify the country where the system is being used or other countries where it may be used in the future.
If accurate, the program would be more powerful than any other NSA program by allowing the spy agency to tap into the entire network from a country.
The NSA would neither confirm nor deny the report but said in a statement that its electronic spying was not “arbitrary”.
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