NSA-GATE KEEPS GETTING WORSE
Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report

From the New York Times courtesy of Eschaton:

The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.

And

Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to Al Qaeda.

What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.

And

This so-called "pattern analysis" on calls within the United States would, in many circumstances, require a court warrant if the government wanted to trace who calls whom.

Click here for the rest.

I've really got a few questions about all this now. If the FISA court virtually always hands out warrants when requested (only six rejections out of 15,000 requests in two decades), why did the NSA blow them off? If, as Bush says, the operation is not illegal, why did they try to get authority for it, which was ultimately rejected, included in the Patriot Act? How could they not know it was illegal when Congress turned them down? Why lie about the vast scope of the wiretapping if it's no big deal?

I think it's pretty obvious what I think. This is waaaaay beyond anything Nixon did. Impeach him; he's just a thug.

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