Russell Tice, who previously blew the whistle on the NSA warrantless eavesdropping, has more to say now that W has left the building. Invited to return for another Countdown appearance tomorrow, he seems to be prepared to list news agencies that weren’t in the "discard" pile but were instead in the "monitor" stack.

Russell TIce concluded — after asking for specific intercepts in order to exclude newsgathering agencies, only to be told repeatedly that these intercepts wouldn’t be a problem — that this eavesdropping wasn’t being done in order to exclude FAXes, phonecalls, and computer communications. This eavesdropping was for the purpose of monitoring these American communications.

Tice does an excellent job in a very short time to distinguish between the "dragnet" and the "harpoon" technologies, and explains that his attempts to exclude categories and groups during his "harpoon" work led him to conclude "collection on these organizations was 24/7, 365 days a year."

"An organization that was collected on were U.S. news organizations and reporters and journalists."