Margaret Newsham

Margaret Newsham (whistleblower)
Nationality	US
Exposed	• ECHELON • Menwith Hill
In 1988, whistleblower Newsham exposed that the NSA conducted real-time phone intercepts of US politicians through the ECHELON system.  Program designer In office 1977 - 1984 Employer Lockheed Location Menwith Hill Whistleblower who exposed how the communications of US politicians were being intercepted via the ECHELON surveillance system.

Margaret Newsham was a US spook who worked for Lockheed Martin, a subcontractor for the National Security Agency, at the Menwith Hill surveillance base in Britain.

In 1988, Newsham told a closed-door session of the United States Congress that the telephone calls of US politicians were being intercepted via the ECHELON surveillance system. Her revelations received no coverage in corporate media.

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, she heard a real-time phone intercept of conversations involving the South Carolina Republican Senator Strom Thurmond. She said she was shocked, because she thought only foreign communications were being monitored.

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.

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.

Afterwards

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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