Who Will Inherit the NSA? (Rall)

[struggle4progress]

NEW YORK -- Several months ago employees of Verizon, the company that enjoys a monopoly on local telephone service where I live, confirmed that my telephone has been tapped by the government. (Note to government: No, I won't reveal their names. No, not even if you throw me in jail. Unlike The New York Times, I protect my sources. Let's just say they're people in a position to know and leave it at that.) <snip>

First and foremost, domestic spying is not an anti-terrorism program. It is terrorism.

"We are not trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans," Bush says. But, in a carbon copy of the Total Information Awareness data-mining project that was shot down in response to a bipartisan public outcry in 2002, that's exactly what the National Security Agency is doing. As USA Today reported on May 11, the NSA purchased the complete "call-detail histories" for every customer of the biggest three phone companies: AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon. "It's the largest database ever assembled in the world," USA Today quotes a source. Your government, paying your tax dollars to companies you already paid to place calls you presumed to be private, is trying "to create a database of every call ever made." <snip>

The CIA estimates that there are between 2,000 and 10,000 al Qaeda members worldwide. Even if there are dozen or two "sleeper cell" members in the United States, they don't use the phone unless they're complete idiots. NSA data-mining will never uncover a terrorist or terrorist plot. <snip>

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucru/20060516/cm_ucru/littlebrotherwillbewatchingyou

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