Margaret Newsham

Margaret Newsham (whistleblower)
Nationality	US
Exposed	• ECHELON • Menwith Hill
In 1988, Newsham exposed that the NSA conducted real-time phone intercepts of US politicians through the ECHELON system.

Margaret Newsham was a US spook who worked at a NSA surveillance base in Britain, where she overheard real-time phone intercepts of US politicians.

In 1988, Newsham, a Lockheed Martin employee, told a closed-door session of the United States Congress that Strom Thurmond's telephone calls were being intercepted by the FVEY via their ECHELON surveillance system.

Whistleblower

For 10 years, from 1974 to 1984, Newsham worked for Lockheed, a NSA contractor, where she designed programs for ECHELON's global surveillance network. Both the satellites and the computer programs were developed at Lockheed's headquarters in Sunnyvale California.

In 1977, she was stationed at the then largest listening post in the world at Menwith Hill, England. According to herself, Newsham was not pleased with herself for participating in spying on ordinary people, politicians, interest groups and private companies, and became concerned about corruption, fraud and abuse within the organization's planning and operating electronic surveillance systems such as ECHELON.

In 1979, says she heard a real-time phone intercept of conversations involving senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC). She was shocked, she recalls, because she thought only foreign communications were being monitored.

She contacted the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence early in 1988. Although the Thurmond incident was reported to the Committee, no substantive investigation took place, and no report was made to Congress. The incident involving Senator Thurmond was first reported by Keith C Epstein and John S Long in the Ohio Plain Dealer in July 1988. Duncan Campbell reported the existence and expansion of the Echelon network in the New Statesman one month later There were no Washington Post, New York Times or Sixty Minutes reports. [{CBS]] reported it 12 years later.

When asked to work on a project in 1984, she refused because she believed it could harm the US government. Shortly after, ECHELON's wirepullers in the National Security Agency (NSA) made sure that she was fired by Lockheed Martin. Immediately afterward, she sued her former employer for wrongful dismissal and contacted the internal security commission, DCAA, which arranged the closed hearing.

In a 1999 interview, Newsham revealed that "she has broken off connection with the world of espionage and lives in constant fear that 'certain elements' in the NSA or CIA will try to silence her. As a result, she sleeps with a loaded pistol under her mattress, and her best friend is Mr. Gunther - a 120-pound German shepherd that was trained to be a guard and attack dog by a good friend in the Nevada State Police."

In the 1999 interview, she predicted:

Even then, ECHELON was very big and sophisticated. As early as 1979 we could track a specific person and zoom in on his phone conversation while he was communicating. Since our satellites could in 1984 film a postage stamp lying on the ground, it is almost impossible to imagine how all-encompassing the system must be today.

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