As Bruce Schneier and others surmised, President Bush’s unwarranted wiretapping effort is much broader and deeper than the administration has acknowledged. According to Eric Lichtblau’s and James Risen’s latest New York Times missive, the National Security Agency (NSA) used a technology that sounds remarkably similar to Echelon to data mine vast quantities of raw email and telephone conversations:
“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.”
What’s perhaps most disturbing in this administration’s war on the citizenry is that US telecommunications companies blithely granted NSA access to the nation’s data and voice infrastructure, possibly even control of the switches — hardware that routes all traffic on the networks. Additionally, the companies have — at the government’s request — increased “the amount of international traffic that is routed through American-based switches.” Traffic that passes through switches on US soil is most likely subject to the domestic surveillance laws — including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) — that the Bush administration sought to evade.
Meanwhile, over at the Washington Post, Jo Becker and Christopher Lee report that Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito Jr. argued that the US Attorney General deserves immunity from lawsuits when enforcing national security, even in the case of illegal wiretaps. In a 1984 memo during his term as a lawyer in the Reagan justice department, Alito left little room for doubt:
“I do not question that the Attorney General should have this immunity. But for tactical reasons, I would not raise the issue here.”
Welcome to America, where, after all, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld keeps reminding us, “we’re on the side of freedom.”
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Wiretapgate plot broadens (and deepens) was originally published by ARTS & FARCES internet on Sunday, 25 December 2005 at 3:31 AM CDT. Copyright © ARTS & FARCES LLC. All rights reserved. | ISSN: 1535-8119 | OCLC: 48219498 | Digital fingerprint: 974a89ee1284e6e92dd256bbfbef3751 (64.237.45.114)