u235

Originally when the brouhaha broke over the NSA tapping phone lines people were comforted that it was only international calls that were being tapped. Most people don't call Jordan, Afghanistan or Iraq on a regular or even lifetime basis. I personally can't ever see myself placing a call to any of those places - so like me, most people just shrugged it off as over zealous media resurrecting the specter of Big Brother. Yes some people who are more dedicated to the idea of the rights and protections of the individuals got upset, and so did congress when they found out they weren't informed, but the average American wasn't being tapped just people who might, slightly, possibly be calling countries where the terrorists were. And the press was just being alarmist.... right,right?

Well, as it turns out they were right, because that wasn't all the NSA was doing. In addition to tapping into phone calls without a warrant they were also getting copies of all, yes that's right ALL domestic calls. Every phone call handled by the following companies: AT&T, Verizon and Bellsouth, time, caller and callee were handed over to the government to create a database of who called whom and when. Only one company Qwest, refused to hand over the records because of concerns for legality and privacy. Props to Qwest.

It's awesome isn't it? Apparently in the name of "national security" your private call data, who you called and when isn't so private. Somehow NSA believes that they can find trending patterns in this truly enormous mountain of data that will enable them to detect terrorist activity. I'm sorry but that's stupid on so many fronts. Terrorists deliberately don't pattern their calls, terrorists tend to communicate in person, and there are so fucking few of them making calls compared to normal people going about their daily life that there's no fucking way in HELL you can pull out a pattern from all the noise in the data.

Oh and back on the other front? The Justice Department dropped it's investigation into the legality of the original warrantless phone tapping program because.... their lawyers couldn't get clearance to access NSA records...

"Oh well, if I can't get a security clearance to uncover evidence then I guess there couldn't possibly be anything wrong with what they were doing...."