NSA whistleblower Russell Tice returned to Countdown to explain how the Bush Administration illegally added complete financial data for people they illegally wiretapped.

Olbermann asked where the program came from, and Tice guessed it was the remnants of Admiral John Poindexter’s “Total Information Awareness” program, which was specifically prohibited by Congress, and the Rumsfeld Department of Defense.

Olbermann also asked who had access to the in-depth information about journalists and what they did with it. Unfortunately Tice was fired when he tried to figure that out.

But it doesn’t take much imagination to answer: Dick Cheney and Karl Rove had access and used it for blackmail and character assassination. For a perfect case study, just look at how they learned Iraq critic Joe Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA – and how they leaked that information to try to destroy him, according to Bob Fertik at Democrats.com.

I breezed right by this headline the other day, having seen it on the wires and linked to it on the news page before. But when a friend in Knoxville mentioned it again in an e-mail message today, I chased down Jeffrey Toobin’s version of the story in The New Yorker: Hack Attack.

Key points:

There the evidence of hacking was obvious: SoapBlox.net had been redesigned, with a logo of a hand and a message that said “destroying online communities.”

Almost accidentally, Paul Preston, the owner and creator of SoapBlox, come to control a critical crossroads in the netroots nation: the informal community of progressive bloggers and online activists who now play an important role in Democratic Party politics.

“We have built this new progressive movement on a lot of volunteer labor, a shoestring budget, a lot of heart and soul, but not a lot of resources,” said Moulitsas, of the Daily Kos. “We’ve got to professionalize our movement, and we can’t rely only on labors of love, like what Paul did.”

Preston plans to assemble a bigger team and to get some backup servers. As for the hacking, he doesn’t know who did it; he has retained a lawyer. In a message on the SoapBlox home page, the vandals wrote, “Hacked By Astalavista Team.” Preston said.

This has Karl Rove’s name all over it if you ask me. We’ve been fighting the bastards down here for four years to keep them from shutting us down with blog spam and server attacks and fake reports to Internet Service Providers about harassing e-mail and every other dirty trick in the book short of hacking and taking over our sites.

Here’s my strong suggestion for activists: Contact the Obama Justice Department and raise this issue and tell them to look deep into Texas, Alabama, Florida and Paraguay for a good chunk of the hacking and spamming that goes on around here. We’ve spent some time tracking it, but not enough. If we spent all our time doing that, we would have no time for journalism.

Now for a funny technology blog rant…

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