RUSH: Here’s Nick in Dalton, Georgia. Nick, welcome. Great to have you with us at the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Good to talk to you, Rush.

RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much!

CALLER: In the early eighties, the mid-eighties I was in the Navy. I worked in intelligence. I was an intelligence gatherer, and we worked hand in hand close to NSA in gathering intelligence. We have always listened to the American telephones — and things that you say, they’ve always been recorded. We’ve always done it. At least when I was in the Reagan administration, we listened to dozens and dozens of phone calls at a time, picking out words that would seem to tip off that we have something that we need to maybe listen to a little closer.

RUSH: Wait, how would you…? Would this include cell phones back in the Reagan years?

CALLER: No, this is not cell phones. This is of course listening to lines, listening to whatever we can capture via satellite, so there were a lot of different —

RUSH: Well, did you guys have to get permission from the phone companies to involve them here?

CALLER: Absolutely not. No.

RUSH: Well, you’re saying something I’ve never heard.

CALLER: Now, if you talk to any NSA agents, of course they’re not gonna admit to it. I’ve been out —

RUSH: I know they had Echelon, but I’ve never heard that there was a structured, purposeful monitoring of innocent Americans’ phone calls.

CALLER: Yeah. Well, it’s all innocent until we need to listen to you. Then it’s no longer innocent, and then a warrant comes out. But anything you say, anything you transmit, it’s in the air. It’s over the wire. It’s up for grabs.

RUSH: I know they can sweep it. I know now they can. I don’t know how far back the Echelon program at NSA goes, but that was the first massive just sweep everything out of the air program that anybody had. I’m gonna track this down and I don’t want you to take it personally here, Nick, but you have to understand my position. Anybody can call here and say anything. I don’t know you, I don’t know who you are. You could be an excellent provocateur. You could hate Reagan. You could be trying to impugn Reagan in the midst of this effort to defend Trump. Could be anything.

I have to consider all these things as a responsible host, not a responsible journalist, ’cause there isn’t such a thing. But as a responsible host, I have to consider all this, so I will take your call and absorb it with interest and I will then begin to see if there’s anything to it. Don’t take it personally. I have to do this. The one thing that we’ve learned in the WikiLeaks dump is that — well, it’s hard to pinpoint one thing. But try this one, that the CIA has — I don’t know when it happened.

Look, folks, there’s hundreds of thousands of pages here. I only got through a couple hundred thousand of them last night. I’ve got much more to go. But they created their own NSA type spy program independent of the NSA because they grew tired of asking the NSA to share data, share information, and they did this with nobody’s knowledge. Nobody until this leak knew that the CIA had basically created their own NSA-like vacuum cleaner to Hoover up all of this data that’s out there. Now, it’s not an exact replica. That’s not the point. It is that they’re doing things that the CIA is not permitted to do. They’re not permitted to operate in the United — (laughing) I can’t say that with a straight face anymore, but I mean theoretically they’re not allowed to.

So now there’s this massive hunt on for the mole. There is a massive hunt to try to find out who is the Snowden here, or is it a group of Snowdens. They’re gonna find out who leaked this stuff. They hope to. They’re doing everything they can to find out who. Nick, I appreciate the call.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay. I made a quick inquiry here because I was intrigued. And fortunately the person to whom I inquired happened to be listening to the program, and this is the interpretation of what our last caller, Nick, was saying. A friend of mine thinks that Nick meant that back in the Reagan era, before the technology had changed so much, there weren’t cell phones.

That’s why I asked him the cell phone question. There weren’t any back then. I mean, they were just starting. The cell phones in your car had to be built in and the battery was the size of your car battery. And you couldn’t change ’em out. So they were mobile, but the pocket cell phones didn’t come around for a while. That’s why I asked him that question.

Anyway, the theory is that during the Reagan era, no warrants were required to collect foreign intelligence outside the U.S. When the technology changed, especially after we hit the nineties, when everything became digital, the NSA sweeps outside the U.S. picked up conversations of Americans inside the U.S. And, by the way, that’s probably how whatever investigation there is of Trump’s associates — that’s how they got Flynn.

I mean, that fat Russian ambassador’s under surveillance, the NSA. Fat Russian ambassador calls Flynn, Flynn takes the call, the Russian ambassador starts talking about lifting sanctions, Flynn didn’t say anything, but that’s probably how they got Flynn ’cause they’re listening to the Russian ambassador. So, you know, Echelon was an anti-Soviet invention in terms of purpose. These NSA sweeps outside the U.S. pick up conversations of Americans inside the U.S., not because they’re being targeted, but because of the way new technology works, there aren’t any international boundaries.

Somebody vacationing in London calls you, there’s no boundary there. If somebody’s being monitored in London legally and they call you, you’re gonna be monitored as well. And so that’s why they’ve changed the rules. And now if the NSA picks up communications of Americans inside the U.S., they’re supposed to minimize it, which means they’re not supposed to access it unless they can meet certain high — So that’s what he said, we sweep up everything, we’re sweeping up everything. And until we found out you might have been involved in something, we never cared.

So, in other words, he might have been legit. He could well have been legit. Snerdley is smiling big time at that reality. I know you wouldn’t want to feel responsible for foisting a fraud on me. Fake news belongs to CNN. We don’t do the fake news here. So, Nick, don’t take any of this personnel here, Nick in Dalton, Georgia.