NSA DOMESTIC SPYING: MUCH
WORSE THAN YOU THOUGHT

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Phone call monitoring sparks outrage

Lawmakers demanded answers from the Bush administration Thursday about a spy agency secretly collecting records of millions of ordinary Americans' phone calls to build a database of all calls within the country.

Facing mounting congressional criticism, President Bush sought to assure Americans that their civil liberties were "fiercely protected."

And

AT&T Corp., Verizon Communications Inc., and BellSouth Corp. telephone companies began turning over records of tens of millions of their customers' phone calls to the NSA program shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, said USA Today, citing anonymous sources it said had direct knowledge of the arrangement.

And

One big telecommunications company, Qwest Communications International Inc., has refused to turn over records to the program, USA Today said, because of privacy and legal concerns.

Click here for the rest.

I think it's safe to say that the White House is not making sure that our civil liberties are "fiercely protected." Indeed, as the article observes, Congress, in reaction to a 1979 Supreme Court case, passed a law that specifically requires a warrant in order for the government to seize records of this sort. That is, Bush is making sure that our civil liberties are being fiercely attacked.

You may wonder what the big deal on this is, given that the illegal NSA wiretapping program was revealed some weeks ago: back then, it was alleged that only calls to foreign locations were being monitored; this is about calls inside the US. And, I might add, I'm a customer of BellSouth. That means my calls have been monitored, too. Fuckers. Beyond the very serious civil liberties concerns here, the corporate willingness to cooperate with the White House on this is truly frightening. If you rip away all the nationalism and militarism from European fascism in the 30s and 40s, what remains is the unique cooperative relationship between government and business that comprised the power-nucleus of fascism. That is, fascism, at its heart, is about corporate-government alliance. And that's what this wiretapping program is apparently.

Each day brings us closer to the unthinkable. I am now taking bets that martial law will be declared before 2009. Any takers?

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