Lied Again

First saying that spying was ordered on the international calls of just a few hundred people with suspected terrorist ties, then changing the line to possibly a few thousand, then changing to an admission that some domestic calls were accidentally monitored, then still firmly stating the program was narrow in scope, we now find out that the volume of information gathered from telephone and Internet communications by the National Security Agency without court-approved warrants was much larger than Bush acknowledged.

Citing current and former government officials, the NY Times said the information was collected by tapping directly into some of the U.S. telecommunication system's main arteries. The officials said the NSA won the cooperation of telecommunications companies to obtain access to both domestic and international communications without first gaining warrants.

As stated in a previous Human Stain post, “Electronic technology has far outstripped the FISA law as written in 1978. The Bushies were not monitoring small numbers of communications – they were data mining. All forms of all electronic communications were being monitored. Every email sent over the Internet, every cell phone conversation, every fax transmission - all were being monitored.”

A former telecommunications technology manager has told the NY Times that the telecommunications industry has been storing information on calling patterns and giving it to the feds since the September 11 attacks.

Posted on The Human Stain