The Gravest Assault on Privacy in U.S. History
Late coming to the story about the NSA's massive telephone record collection program? The Washington Post does a 360-degree report. Neither Bush nor his aides denied any facts in the original USA Today story. Senate Intel Chair Pat Roberts wants to shoot the messenger (USA Today). Bush's pick for CIA chief, Gen. Michael Hayden, oversaw this program at the NSA, a fact that guarantees fireworks at his confirmation hearing. Check out the original story.
Late coming to the story about the NSA’s massive telephone record collection program? The Washington Post does a 360-degree report.
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The Bush administration has secretly been collecting the domestic telephone records of millions of U.S. households and businesses, assembling gargantuan databases and attempting to sift through them for clues about terrorist threats, according to sources with knowledge of the program.
The “call detail records” enable U.S. intelligence agencies to track who calls whom, and when, but do not include the contents of conversations, the sources said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the program. The companies cooperating with the National Security Agency dominate the U.S. telecommunications market and connect hundreds of billions of telephone calls each year. Intelligence analysts are seeking to mine their records to expose hidden connections and details of social networks, hoping to find signs of terrorist plots in the vast sea of innocent contacts.
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For a company whose governing motto has been "Don’t be evil," this move seems to confirm some of the worst fears of privacy and Internet rights activists.
In a scathing editorial, the Gray Lady says Barack Obama's presidency, which once promised unprecedented transparency, is instead "proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it."
In cities across the country, the government is installing sophisticated audio surveillance equipment on public transit to listen in on passengers.
The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear a case against the nation's telecommunications companies for cooperating with a once-secret wiretap program enacted by the Bush administration to monitor suspected terrorists.
You know a legislative compromise is one-sided when the AP headline announcing its passage reads "Senate Bows to Bush." Democratic advocates of the new FISA bill, passed by the Senate on Wednesday, are still trying to explain what they got in exchange for rolling back a few civil liberties and burying some of the president's abuses. When they figure it out, someone, somewhere, will surely be listening.
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