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Born at the Crest of the Empire

Monday, March 10, 2008

Shhhh......

The WSJ has a piece on the NSA monitoring domestic communications.
The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system.

The central role the NSA has come to occupy in domestic intelligence gathering has never been publicly disclosed. But an inquiry reveals that its efforts have evolved to reach more broadly into data about people's communications, travel and finances in the U.S. than the domestic surveillance programs brought to light since the 2001 terrorist attacks.....

According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called "transactional" data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns. Then they spit out leads to be explored by counterterrorism programs across the U.S. government, such as the NSA's own Terrorist Surveillance Program, formed to intercept phone calls and emails between the U.S. and overseas without a judge's approval when a link to al Qaeda is suspected.


In other words, typing the wrong email subject, booking the wrong ticket, running the wrong internet search could get you transferred to any other surveillance program. All computers, all without a warrant.

3 Comments:

  • TIA, baby. TIA.

    I wonder if the House dems will grow a collective backbone?

    By Blogger -epm, at 3:10 PM  

  • That's exactly what it is, only further.

    And, no.

    By Blogger mikevotes, at 4:06 PM  

  • Yeah. Didn't think so. There are some passionate Dems in the House (my Paul Hodes for example), but most of them have proven to be as useful as a Speedo in February... in New England.... Never mind. It's cold.

    By Blogger -epm, at 4:36 PM  

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