As usual, when it comes to W's abuse of power, it's worse than we thought. Current and former government officials tell us that the volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, authorized by President Bush after Sept. 11, 2001, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged.
Worse yet, "it was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries."
So it seems your friendly American telecommunications company to which many of you pay your hard earned dollars for their services every month, are cooperating with the government to spy on their own customers.
I can hear the new ad campaign now: "Reach out and Tap someone."
The New York Times reports "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.
[...]
Historically, the American intelligence community has had close relationships with many communications and computer firms and related technical industries. But the N.S.A.'s backdoor access to major telecommunications switches on American soil with the cooperation of major corporations represents a significant expansion of the agency's operational capability, according to current and former government officials.
Phil Karn, a computer engineer and technology expert at a major West Coast telecommunications company, said access to such switches would be significant. 'If the government is gaining access to the switches like this, what you're really talking about is the capability of an enormous vacuum operation to sweep up data,' he said."
PHOTO: (Doug Mills/Associated Press) In 2002, President Bush toured the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Md., with Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who was then the agency's director and is now a full general and the principal deputy director of national intelligence.
See Article: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report - Eric Lichtblau and James Risen - New York Times
Related Articles:
• Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts - New York Times
• Congress Never Authorized Spying Effort, Daschle Says - New York Times
• Daschle: Congress Denied Bush War Powers in U.S.
• t r u t h o u t - Michael Scherer | Crypto Man After reporting on America's spying operations for 25 years, James Bamford is speaking out against Bush's FISA runaround. He says the wiretapping is illegal.
• Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Double rebuke for Bush as judges attack terror moves President George Bush faced a rare challenge from the judiciary yesterday when two courts questioned the legality of his expansion of presidential powers in the war on terror.
• Judges on Surveillance Court To Be Briefed on Spy Program Some of the judges said they are particularly concerned that information gleaned from the president's eavesdropping program may have been improperly used to gain authorized wiretaps from their court.
• Alito Memo in '84 Favored Immunity for Top Officials - New York Times
• Wiretaps said to sift all overseas contacts - The Boston Globe
• Specter Wants Jan. Surveillance Hearings - New York Times
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Looks like Britain is going the way of Bushco ... in it's own special way ....
See inoodle.com: Britain will be first country to monitor every car journey - by Steve Connor
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