NewsMax's Zombie Falsehood
Topic: Newsmax
A May 11 NewsMax article attacks a USA Today article on a massive NSA database that compiles the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans as old news, "though liberal media outlets have been blaring the story as a shocking revelation all Thursday morning." According to NewsMax, "CBS's '60 Minutes' blew the lid off the agency's domestic wiretapping in Feb. 2000, when the Clinton administration was using it for all sorts of unauthorized purposes." The article links to a December 2005 NewsMax item as proof.

But the NSA monitoring program specifically referenced in the December NewsMax article, called Echelon, predates the Clinton administration, as ConWebWatch has documented. Further, the article doesn't even claim, as the May 11 NewsMax article says it does, that "the Clinton administration was using it for all sorts of unauthorized purposes," let alone offer evidence to support that claim.

Further, the December article implies that under Clinton administration orders, "the NSA had even monitored and tape recorded the conversations of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond." This is false; that monitoring took place in the 1980s, well before Clinton took office. A NewsMax article more explicitly making that false claim abruptly disappeared from NewsMax's website without explanation.