Post Revelation Hysteria: The Media In Full Spin Mode
Yesterday was a big day for the blogosphere, and the big guns came out swinging. The media came out swinging for the fences when the USA Today hit the newsstands. Unfortunately for the MSM, they struck out more times than I can count. Byt the end of the day, Jack Cafferty was reduced to babbling about "total dictatorships" and Patrick Leahy was report that "we failed any kind of war on terror." Oh, how the nuts love to dance with the devil in the pale moonlight. First thing this morning, before I toddled off to bed, I waited for the New York Times to put up their lead editorial today, just to see if I was right. Yeah, I was right. They went nutter. Take a look at a couple of the things the Times had to offer this morning:
"Now there is more reason than ever to be worried — and angry — about how wide the government's web has been reaching."
Whoops. I guess the Times missed this overnight polling data from the WaPo:
The new survey found that 63 percent of Americans said they found the NSA program to be an acceptable way to investigate terrorism, including 44 percent who strongly endorsed the effort. Another 35 percent said the program was unacceptable, which included 24 percent who strongly objected to it.
A slightly larger majority--66 percent--said they would not be bothered if NSA collected records of personal calls they had made, the poll found.
Underlying those views is the belief that the need to investigate terrorism outweighs privacy concerns. According to the poll, 65 percent of those interviewed said it was more important to investigate potential terrorist threats "even if it intrudes on privacy." Three in 10--31 percent--said it was more important for the federal government not to intrude on personal privacy, even if that limits its ability to investigate possible terrorist threats.
If I may, I'd like to divert our attention to something important regarding investigations, surveillance, and limits on such things. John Hinderaker picked up on this story from Macleans:
The suicide bombers who killed 52 passengers on London's transit system had a string of contacts with someone in Pakistan just before striking, Britain's top law enforcement official said Thursday.
However, authorities admitted they didn't know what was discussed in those contacts and stuck with their contention that the blasts were a home-grown plot and that the degree of involvement by al-Qaida, if any, was unknown.
Thursday's report by the Intelligence and Security Committee concluded that intelligence agents had been alerted to two of the suicide bombers before the attacks but limited resources prevented them from uncovering the plot.
See, we are not like Great Britain. And the reason we aren't is because we remember what the president said when this war started. This was a new type of war with a new type of enemy. This war was going to be fought in the shadows for the most part, and by people we'd never see or be able to thank because we'll have no idea whgat they've done. On top of that, he asked us for sacrifice. Some small, and some large. The NSA has asked for small things, and the MSM's insane, stupid, and utterly idiotic stance that we're all being surveilled and Big Brother has arrived shows just how unprofessional this industry has become.
On the same day the WaPo puts up that poll (today), Eugene Robinson--nutter extraordinaire, and all-around opinion columnist hack--tries to top the Times with this ridiculously clueless editorial.
At least now we know that the Bush administration's name for spying on Americans without first seeking court approval -- the "terrorist surveillance program" -- isn't an exercise in Orwellian doublespeak after all. It's just a bald-faced lie.
Smile when you say that, asshat, because maybe then you can convince some of the lemmings that still purchase this cage liner. It isn't a lie, nor is it double-speak. It is, as we have been told. It is a surveillance program designed to locate and ferret out our enemies. There's nothing illegal about it, and it doesn't concern any sort of domestic spying. We are looking for terrorists.
Oh, and at least now the Senate will have a few questions to ask Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the man George W. Bush just named to head the CIA, at his confirmation hearings.
Actually, I've got a couple question for Mr. Robinson. He, like the rest of the idiotarians in the press keep calling this "domestic spying" or "domestic wiretapping." Do they have ANY proof of that? Meaning, do they have proof that any average American citizen has been surveilled? Do they? Because their allegations seem to state they do, but as yet none of these fools can prove it. That would be a shocking bombshell, to say the least, is if they could actually find someone this has applied to, other than, of course, terrorists. Instead of wasting time, ink, and print space slamming the hell out of the administration for protecting the nation, couldn't they find something just a bit more worthwhile to do, like retire already?
While Hayden was running the super-secret National Security Agency, according to a report yesterday in USA Today, the NSA began collecting comprehensive records of telephone calls made by "tens of millions of Americans." If your service is provided by AT&T, Verizon or BellSouth, according to the newspaper, this means your phone calls -- all the calls you've made since late 2001. Of the major phone companies, only Qwest reportedly declined to cooperate.
That's because Qwest has a lawyer with a .25 cent head that clearly doesn't understand that there is nothing wrong with what the NSA asked of the phone companies. It doesn't violate the Fourth Amendment, and Smith v. Maryland supports what the government is doing. Further, none of the information collected is personal; it is, as anyone can see from their own phone bills, exactly what we get on a monthly basis. The exception is (and this is speculation here) that the NSA likely has a program where they can plug certain numbers in it to see who's been talking to terrorists. After using the program, they contact one of the three companies to ask for number lists, call frequencies, etc., and search for patterns. It's that simple, and hardly worth the screaming meemies in the press.
The allegation, which the president refused to confirm or deny, is not that the spooks are actually listening in as you call home to check on the kids or talk to the bank about refinancing your mortgage. Rather, the idea is to be able to look at a given phone number -- yours, let's say -- and see all the other numbers that you called or that called you over a given period.
No names are attached to the numbers. But a snoopy civilian with Internet access can match a name with a phone number, so imagine what the government can do.
Careful Eugene, I hear the black helicopters coming to get you right now. And they have their snoopy civilian in the back tracking you. Yeah, you didn't know about the burst transmitter that is attached to your new pair of glasses. Ha-ha! Uncle Sam's been watching you! But seriously, yes we do have some people on the 'Net that can do something similar. What else is new? I wish a couple of them would come along and permanently crash the Times of the WaPo. It'd make it a helluva lot easier for management to start over from scrath, and it makes the hard fall at the end much more bearable.
You'll recall that when it was revealed last year that the NSA was eavesdropping on phone calls and reading e-mails without first going to court for a warrant, the president said his "terrorist surveillance program" targeted international communications in which at least one party was overseas, and then only when at least one party was suspected of some terrorist involvement. Thus no one but terrorists had anything to worry about.
Not remotely true, it turns out, unless tens of millions of Americans are members of al-Qaeda sleeper cells -- evildoers who cleverly disguise their relentless plotting as sales calls, gossip sessions and votes for Elliott on "American Idol." (One implication, by the way, is that the NSA is able to know who got voted off "Idol" before Ryan Seacrest does.)
Patrick Leahy must be proud today because Eugene Robinson--a man with little talent or brains--took his little quopte from yesterday, and used it in his column. (Which coincidently is how our enemy does this sort of propagandist pap; take a sound bite from a blowhard in Congress, or from the willing and enabling treasonous press, and run with it in your very own talking points video. Osama does it. Zarqawi does it. You'd think they'd gone to the Cronkite School of Journalism.) The NSA isn't listening to our phone conversations unless Zawahiri on the other end, or Rasul, or Hamdi, or some other AOL-techie terrorist from that region. The same thing goes for the e-mails. See, this is what the media misses. In this case, if they have Zarqawi's phone number, and they plug it into their program, and it pops up about fifty or so matches in the US the NSA will look at those matches. If it's consistent, they go for a warrant to begin surveillance. That was admitted and emphasized in the USA Today piece! If it's not consistent, they flag it and continue to watch it.
Step back for a moment. There's an understandable tendency, with this administration, to succumb to a kind of "outrage fatigue." Pre-cooked intelligence on Iraq, secret CIA prisons, Abu Ghraib -- the accretion is numbing, and it's easy just to say "there they go again" and count the months until the Decider heads home to Texas for good. Bush and his people have tried to turn flouting the law into a virtue if it's a law they find inconvenient. They've tried to radically change our concept of privacy. We already knew the NSA was somehow monitoring phone calls, so what's the big deal?
We should have seen this coming. Everytime Robinson does an editorial that tries to slam the administration, he has to inject all of the talking points of the media into it. I'm so sick of defending the administration against these lies that I'm about ready to scream. They haven't tried to change anyone's "concept" of privacy. The president is abiding by the law. The Patriot Act removed much of the wall erected during the Clinton administration that prevented law enforcement and intelligence agencies from sharing information. The FISA court tried to reestablish those roadblocks, and they were struck down by the FISA Court of Review. The NSA terrorist surveillance program searches for our enemies here in America--enemies that we have caught, like the Lackawanna Six, and the cell in Lodi, CA. The MSM would prefer that facts like these were omitted in any sense; it makes their insanely stupid editorial more believable.
The big deal is that now we know that the administration -- I'll say "apparently," although if the report were untrue I think the president would have denied it -- is keeping track of the phone calls of millions of citizens who have nothing at all to do with terrorism. Bush has tried to convince us that the overwhelming majority of Americans are not affected by domestic surveillance, but now we know that the opposite is true: The overwhelming majority of us are.
No, Eugene, your tin-foil hat fell off, and you think we're all targets. We're not. I doubt that I am, and I'm sure that the fair majority of people believe that are also not targets of this sort of data mining operation. And just because Patrick Leahy sees ten of millions of Americans as targets doesn't make it so. (Funny how he's willing to take the word of a man who was thrown off of the Senate Intelligence Committee for leaking, yet he refuses to take the word of the president who hasn't done anything wrong, as yet.)
The president's claim, in his brief statement on the report, that the government isn't "trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans" is as disingenuous as Bill Clinton's claim that he "didn't inhale." There's no point in collecting all that information if you don't analyze it, and when you do it's inevitable that you learn things about at least some innocent people that those people thought were nobody else's business, certainly not the government's.
Comparing Clinton's admission that he "didn't inhale" to the president speaking about national security, and our efforts to maintain that security is a bit like comparing apples to oranges, don't you think? They're not collecting information that doesn't match their parameters. As I explained above, if a number is a constant hit for the NSA's computers, then they start the process of obtaining a warrant to begin surveillance. The NSA admitted that. And as for what's learned, their names, addresses, and personal information--such as Social Security numbers--aren't accessed until they have the warrant. They are looking at calls coming in, calls going out, frequency of those calls, length of time, etc. They're not even listening to the conversation.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), his frustration evident, said he intended to call executives of AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth to testify at hearings he plans to hold, since the administration won't explain just what it's doing.
It might come as a surprise to Robinson, but Arlen Specter isn't cleared for this sort of information. He's not on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is privy to this knowledge. (Another reason why Leahy was thrown off--the committee doesn't want that information getting out.) He can proclaim what he's going to do, but if the Justice Department, or members of the Intelligence committee tell them they can't talk about certain things, then Specter's run into a dead end. The Judiciary committee doesn't have some sort of "super authority" over all the aspects of the federal government, nor can they supercede the authority the Intelligence committee has when it somes to classified material. Let him posture all he wants until the cows come home, but he's not going to get too far on that boast.
And, of course, Hayden's confirmation hearings are coming up. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who has been one of Hayden's strong supporters, said the new disclosures on spying may create "a growing impediment" to a nomination that was expected to quickly sail through.
"Shame on us, in being so far behind and so willing to rubber-stamp anything this administration does," said Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). He was referring to the Senate, but he could have been speaking for the entire nation.
Thank God Leahy wasn't speaking for the whole nation, because then we'd all be just as blindingly stupid as he is. The Democrats are posturing over this because they think, once again, they have a "gotcha" moment. Like all the rest, this one will fall apart, too. The MSM is salivating over an apparent non-scandal, and waiting for the scraps to be thrown in its direction from the Democrats for a "job well done." Except that what the USA Today did was report on a a story that was four and a half months old. The original New York Times article alluded to other programs. This was one of them.
But it doesn't change the fact that the MSM, once again, deemed it necessary to "declassify" another secrety program we're using against our enemies. I've been reluctant to say this, but if this were world War II, and the press were doing this consistently against FDR and our war efforts then, the reporters involved would have likely been tossed in jail for breaking the law; no protection under the First Amendment can protect them from knowingly and willingly revealing classified secrets. That's why we have the law in place.
But this hysteria has got to come to an end. The Left has no idea what it's talking about. It has no idea what the NSA is really doing. And they have no arguments to substantiate the allegation that Americans are being secretly watched or listened to. We've known for some time that ECHELON (an NSA program that's been around since the sixties) has the ability to monitor close to a half million phone calls an hour worldwide. For Robinson, the New York Times, or the USA Today to proclaim this is "somthing new" or "something sinister" I'd like to know where their outrage has been for the past twenty or so years. Hell, the IRS has more on us than the NSA does.
Publius II
Yesterday was a big day for the blogosphere, and the big guns came out swinging. The media came out swinging for the fences when the USA Today hit the newsstands. Unfortunately for the MSM, they struck out more times than I can count. Byt the end of the day, Jack Cafferty was reduced to babbling about "total dictatorships" and Patrick Leahy was report that "we failed any kind of war on terror." Oh, how the nuts love to dance with the devil in the pale moonlight. First thing this morning, before I toddled off to bed, I waited for the New York Times to put up their lead editorial today, just to see if I was right. Yeah, I was right. They went nutter. Take a look at a couple of the things the Times had to offer this morning:
"Now there is more reason than ever to be worried — and angry — about how wide the government's web has been reaching."
Whoops. I guess the Times missed this overnight polling data from the WaPo:
The new survey found that 63 percent of Americans said they found the NSA program to be an acceptable way to investigate terrorism, including 44 percent who strongly endorsed the effort. Another 35 percent said the program was unacceptable, which included 24 percent who strongly objected to it.
A slightly larger majority--66 percent--said they would not be bothered if NSA collected records of personal calls they had made, the poll found.
Underlying those views is the belief that the need to investigate terrorism outweighs privacy concerns. According to the poll, 65 percent of those interviewed said it was more important to investigate potential terrorist threats "even if it intrudes on privacy." Three in 10--31 percent--said it was more important for the federal government not to intrude on personal privacy, even if that limits its ability to investigate possible terrorist threats.
If I may, I'd like to divert our attention to something important regarding investigations, surveillance, and limits on such things. John Hinderaker picked up on this story from Macleans:
The suicide bombers who killed 52 passengers on London's transit system had a string of contacts with someone in Pakistan just before striking, Britain's top law enforcement official said Thursday.
However, authorities admitted they didn't know what was discussed in those contacts and stuck with their contention that the blasts were a home-grown plot and that the degree of involvement by al-Qaida, if any, was unknown.
Thursday's report by the Intelligence and Security Committee concluded that intelligence agents had been alerted to two of the suicide bombers before the attacks but limited resources prevented them from uncovering the plot.
See, we are not like Great Britain. And the reason we aren't is because we remember what the president said when this war started. This was a new type of war with a new type of enemy. This war was going to be fought in the shadows for the most part, and by people we'd never see or be able to thank because we'll have no idea whgat they've done. On top of that, he asked us for sacrifice. Some small, and some large. The NSA has asked for small things, and the MSM's insane, stupid, and utterly idiotic stance that we're all being surveilled and Big Brother has arrived shows just how unprofessional this industry has become.
On the same day the WaPo puts up that poll (today), Eugene Robinson--nutter extraordinaire, and all-around opinion columnist hack--tries to top the Times with this ridiculously clueless editorial.
At least now we know that the Bush administration's name for spying on Americans without first seeking court approval -- the "terrorist surveillance program" -- isn't an exercise in Orwellian doublespeak after all. It's just a bald-faced lie.
Smile when you say that, asshat, because maybe then you can convince some of the lemmings that still purchase this cage liner. It isn't a lie, nor is it double-speak. It is, as we have been told. It is a surveillance program designed to locate and ferret out our enemies. There's nothing illegal about it, and it doesn't concern any sort of domestic spying. We are looking for terrorists.
Oh, and at least now the Senate will have a few questions to ask Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the man George W. Bush just named to head the CIA, at his confirmation hearings.
Actually, I've got a couple question for Mr. Robinson. He, like the rest of the idiotarians in the press keep calling this "domestic spying" or "domestic wiretapping." Do they have ANY proof of that? Meaning, do they have proof that any average American citizen has been surveilled? Do they? Because their allegations seem to state they do, but as yet none of these fools can prove it. That would be a shocking bombshell, to say the least, is if they could actually find someone this has applied to, other than, of course, terrorists. Instead of wasting time, ink, and print space slamming the hell out of the administration for protecting the nation, couldn't they find something just a bit more worthwhile to do, like retire already?
While Hayden was running the super-secret National Security Agency, according to a report yesterday in USA Today, the NSA began collecting comprehensive records of telephone calls made by "tens of millions of Americans." If your service is provided by AT&T, Verizon or BellSouth, according to the newspaper, this means your phone calls -- all the calls you've made since late 2001. Of the major phone companies, only Qwest reportedly declined to cooperate.
That's because Qwest has a lawyer with a .25 cent head that clearly doesn't understand that there is nothing wrong with what the NSA asked of the phone companies. It doesn't violate the Fourth Amendment, and Smith v. Maryland supports what the government is doing. Further, none of the information collected is personal; it is, as anyone can see from their own phone bills, exactly what we get on a monthly basis. The exception is (and this is speculation here) that the NSA likely has a program where they can plug certain numbers in it to see who's been talking to terrorists. After using the program, they contact one of the three companies to ask for number lists, call frequencies, etc., and search for patterns. It's that simple, and hardly worth the screaming meemies in the press.
The allegation, which the president refused to confirm or deny, is not that the spooks are actually listening in as you call home to check on the kids or talk to the bank about refinancing your mortgage. Rather, the idea is to be able to look at a given phone number -- yours, let's say -- and see all the other numbers that you called or that called you over a given period.
No names are attached to the numbers. But a snoopy civilian with Internet access can match a name with a phone number, so imagine what the government can do.
Careful Eugene, I hear the black helicopters coming to get you right now. And they have their snoopy civilian in the back tracking you. Yeah, you didn't know about the burst transmitter that is attached to your new pair of glasses. Ha-ha! Uncle Sam's been watching you! But seriously, yes we do have some people on the 'Net that can do something similar. What else is new? I wish a couple of them would come along and permanently crash the Times of the WaPo. It'd make it a helluva lot easier for management to start over from scrath, and it makes the hard fall at the end much more bearable.
You'll recall that when it was revealed last year that the NSA was eavesdropping on phone calls and reading e-mails without first going to court for a warrant, the president said his "terrorist surveillance program" targeted international communications in which at least one party was overseas, and then only when at least one party was suspected of some terrorist involvement. Thus no one but terrorists had anything to worry about.
Not remotely true, it turns out, unless tens of millions of Americans are members of al-Qaeda sleeper cells -- evildoers who cleverly disguise their relentless plotting as sales calls, gossip sessions and votes for Elliott on "American Idol." (One implication, by the way, is that the NSA is able to know who got voted off "Idol" before Ryan Seacrest does.)
Patrick Leahy must be proud today because Eugene Robinson--a man with little talent or brains--took his little quopte from yesterday, and used it in his column. (Which coincidently is how our enemy does this sort of propagandist pap; take a sound bite from a blowhard in Congress, or from the willing and enabling treasonous press, and run with it in your very own talking points video. Osama does it. Zarqawi does it. You'd think they'd gone to the Cronkite School of Journalism.) The NSA isn't listening to our phone conversations unless Zawahiri on the other end, or Rasul, or Hamdi, or some other AOL-techie terrorist from that region. The same thing goes for the e-mails. See, this is what the media misses. In this case, if they have Zarqawi's phone number, and they plug it into their program, and it pops up about fifty or so matches in the US the NSA will look at those matches. If it's consistent, they go for a warrant to begin surveillance. That was admitted and emphasized in the USA Today piece! If it's not consistent, they flag it and continue to watch it.
Step back for a moment. There's an understandable tendency, with this administration, to succumb to a kind of "outrage fatigue." Pre-cooked intelligence on Iraq, secret CIA prisons, Abu Ghraib -- the accretion is numbing, and it's easy just to say "there they go again" and count the months until the Decider heads home to Texas for good. Bush and his people have tried to turn flouting the law into a virtue if it's a law they find inconvenient. They've tried to radically change our concept of privacy. We already knew the NSA was somehow monitoring phone calls, so what's the big deal?
We should have seen this coming. Everytime Robinson does an editorial that tries to slam the administration, he has to inject all of the talking points of the media into it. I'm so sick of defending the administration against these lies that I'm about ready to scream. They haven't tried to change anyone's "concept" of privacy. The president is abiding by the law. The Patriot Act removed much of the wall erected during the Clinton administration that prevented law enforcement and intelligence agencies from sharing information. The FISA court tried to reestablish those roadblocks, and they were struck down by the FISA Court of Review. The NSA terrorist surveillance program searches for our enemies here in America--enemies that we have caught, like the Lackawanna Six, and the cell in Lodi, CA. The MSM would prefer that facts like these were omitted in any sense; it makes their insanely stupid editorial more believable.
The big deal is that now we know that the administration -- I'll say "apparently," although if the report were untrue I think the president would have denied it -- is keeping track of the phone calls of millions of citizens who have nothing at all to do with terrorism. Bush has tried to convince us that the overwhelming majority of Americans are not affected by domestic surveillance, but now we know that the opposite is true: The overwhelming majority of us are.
No, Eugene, your tin-foil hat fell off, and you think we're all targets. We're not. I doubt that I am, and I'm sure that the fair majority of people believe that are also not targets of this sort of data mining operation. And just because Patrick Leahy sees ten of millions of Americans as targets doesn't make it so. (Funny how he's willing to take the word of a man who was thrown off of the Senate Intelligence Committee for leaking, yet he refuses to take the word of the president who hasn't done anything wrong, as yet.)
The president's claim, in his brief statement on the report, that the government isn't "trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans" is as disingenuous as Bill Clinton's claim that he "didn't inhale." There's no point in collecting all that information if you don't analyze it, and when you do it's inevitable that you learn things about at least some innocent people that those people thought were nobody else's business, certainly not the government's.
Comparing Clinton's admission that he "didn't inhale" to the president speaking about national security, and our efforts to maintain that security is a bit like comparing apples to oranges, don't you think? They're not collecting information that doesn't match their parameters. As I explained above, if a number is a constant hit for the NSA's computers, then they start the process of obtaining a warrant to begin surveillance. The NSA admitted that. And as for what's learned, their names, addresses, and personal information--such as Social Security numbers--aren't accessed until they have the warrant. They are looking at calls coming in, calls going out, frequency of those calls, length of time, etc. They're not even listening to the conversation.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), his frustration evident, said he intended to call executives of AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth to testify at hearings he plans to hold, since the administration won't explain just what it's doing.
It might come as a surprise to Robinson, but Arlen Specter isn't cleared for this sort of information. He's not on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is privy to this knowledge. (Another reason why Leahy was thrown off--the committee doesn't want that information getting out.) He can proclaim what he's going to do, but if the Justice Department, or members of the Intelligence committee tell them they can't talk about certain things, then Specter's run into a dead end. The Judiciary committee doesn't have some sort of "super authority" over all the aspects of the federal government, nor can they supercede the authority the Intelligence committee has when it somes to classified material. Let him posture all he wants until the cows come home, but he's not going to get too far on that boast.
And, of course, Hayden's confirmation hearings are coming up. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who has been one of Hayden's strong supporters, said the new disclosures on spying may create "a growing impediment" to a nomination that was expected to quickly sail through.
"Shame on us, in being so far behind and so willing to rubber-stamp anything this administration does," said Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). He was referring to the Senate, but he could have been speaking for the entire nation.
Thank God Leahy wasn't speaking for the whole nation, because then we'd all be just as blindingly stupid as he is. The Democrats are posturing over this because they think, once again, they have a "gotcha" moment. Like all the rest, this one will fall apart, too. The MSM is salivating over an apparent non-scandal, and waiting for the scraps to be thrown in its direction from the Democrats for a "job well done." Except that what the USA Today did was report on a a story that was four and a half months old. The original New York Times article alluded to other programs. This was one of them.
But it doesn't change the fact that the MSM, once again, deemed it necessary to "declassify" another secrety program we're using against our enemies. I've been reluctant to say this, but if this were world War II, and the press were doing this consistently against FDR and our war efforts then, the reporters involved would have likely been tossed in jail for breaking the law; no protection under the First Amendment can protect them from knowingly and willingly revealing classified secrets. That's why we have the law in place.
But this hysteria has got to come to an end. The Left has no idea what it's talking about. It has no idea what the NSA is really doing. And they have no arguments to substantiate the allegation that Americans are being secretly watched or listened to. We've known for some time that ECHELON (an NSA program that's been around since the sixties) has the ability to monitor close to a half million phone calls an hour worldwide. For Robinson, the New York Times, or the USA Today to proclaim this is "somthing new" or "something sinister" I'd like to know where their outrage has been for the past twenty or so years. Hell, the IRS has more on us than the NSA does.
Publius II
posted by Syd And Vaughn | 10:38 AM
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