Bush Manages to Somehow Lie and Confirm the Story At the Same Time

In Tony Snow's first full day of lying while employed at the White House, we find out that the NSA isn't listening to our phone calls. That is probably a lie too - we already know there is a large database of millions of actual conversations, and given their easy disregard for law, one might ask what exactly is stopping them?

Of course, that wasn't the question at hand - the question is whether all of the records of our phone calls are being gathered and searched. Bush's lack of denial would suggest that they are indeed - but of course that assumes that for some reason he didn't want to lie while answering that question, which itself stretches credulity, as it suggests that for the first time, he had some vestigal interest in not lying...ahem.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, that normally handles secret wiretapping requests, is incredibly deferential to the government, denying only the tiniest fraction of one percent of warrant for actual wiretap requests, if any, so why is the Administration so obsessed with getting around even this tiny nod to the legal system? A judge recently resigned from this
court in disgust at how little oversight the court was providing. And you can get a wiretap and a warrant LATER (within three days, I believe) already.

LATEST ACLU news on this (Click Below, Get a Free Secret Dossier!)

A GRAPHIC ESTIMATE ON THE NSA's OPERATIONS

Security Expert Quotes.
NSA Surveillance Overview.
Latest from ACLU's NSA Watch.

The answers are all dark. Between FISA and the Patriot Act, there are no important barriers to directed inception of electronic commications if you have the slightest specific indication of criminality - the standard isn't really probable cause, or even reasonable suspicion. It's more like : maybe that guy. You know: that one. And the secret FISA's real world job is to say, all the time, oh, well, that wiretap was okay then.

So what's the big push to be able to monitor everyone without any judicial review of any kind?

The building of these giant databases, plus the internet, plus the ability of the government to search financial and medical records (Patriot Act) without a warrant, suggests something far beyond , and far darker, than trying to catch terrorists.

The Administration's denials seem to amount to this:

We do have a set of vast databases that can cover everyone - essentially, a federal Google of our whole lives, political, economic, medical, financial, personal - and we do troll through them with social networking analysis and other kinds of highly sophisticated software tools looking for patterns than can identify terrorist activity.

But because real human agents don't actually type in the name of each of you to bring up the data into this Fedoogle to build a specific dossier of your information, unless we think there's might be some reason to, no law is being violated. And if we do, it's only because we're searching for a terrorist, so it's okay.

There's no review. There's no getting anyone out of the system. There is zero accountability. If you criticise, you're helping terrorists. And there are powerful, powerful incentives to abuse this ability to the upmost, to the perpetual maintainence of power, to the emasculation of American freedom.