Your responses are interesting... a profane, one word response...and accusation that I am a republican. As I said before wake up. How about a little open minded intellectual discussion, not the closed minded, simple thinking attacks you have just levied.
The PROOF you asked for:
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Source:Investor's Business Daily www.investors.com January 4, 2006 WednesdayBut such surveillance was not always so limited in scope and purpose. In the 1990 s, under the administration of William Jefferson Clinton, the NSA monitored millions of private phone calls placed by U.S. citizens and citizens of other countries under a super secret program code-named Echelon.
In a February 2000 story on CBS' "60 Minutes," correspondent Steve Kroft introduced the piece on the Clinton-era spy program by saying: "If you've made a phone call today or sent an e-mail to a friend, there's a good chance that what you said or wrote was captured or screened by the country's largest intelligence agency."
One Echelon operator in Britain told "60 Minutes" that it had even monitored and tape-recorded the conversations of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond.
Echelon, in other words, was truly a secret program that spied on Americans...
Source: From BBC Nov. 1999 - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/503224.stmBoth Britain and America deny allegations like this, though they refuse to comment further. But one former US army intelligence officer has broken the code of silence.
Colonel Dan Smith told the BBC that while this is feasible, it is not official policy: "Technically they can scoop all this information up, sort through it, and find what it is that might be asked for," he said. "But there is no policy to do this specifically in response to a particular company's interests."
Legislators on both sides of the Atlantic are beginning to sit up and take notice. Republican Congressman Bob Barr has persuaded congress to open hearings into these and other allegations.
In December he is coming to Britain to raise awareness of the issue. In an interview with the BBC he accused the NSA of conducting a broad "dragnet" of communications, and "invading the privacy of American citizens."
He is joined in his concerns by a small number of politicians In Britain. Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker has tabled a series of questions about Menwith Hill, but has been met with a wall of silence.
Source: http://fly.hiwaay.net/~pspoole/echelon.html To accommodate the need for information regarding international commercial deals, the intelligence agencies set up a small, unpublicized department within the Department of Commerce, the Office of Intelligence Liaison. This office receives intelligence reports from the US intelligence agencies about pending international deals that it discreetly forwards to companies that request it or may have an interest in the information. Immediately after coming to office in January 1993, President Clinton added to the corporate espionage machine by creating the National Economic Council, which feeds intelligence to “select” companies to enhance US competitiveness. The capabilities of ECHELON to spy on foreign companies is nothing new, but the Clinton administration has raised its use to an art:
In 1990 the German magazine Der Speigel revealed that the NSA had intercepted messages about an impending $200 million deal between Indonesia and the Japanese satellite manufacturer NEC Corp. After President Bush intervened in the negotiations on behalf of American manufacturers, the contract was split between NEC and AT&T.
In 1994, the CIA and NSA intercepted phone calls between Brazilian officials and the French firm Thomson-CSF about a radar system that the Brazilians wanted to purchase. A US firm, Raytheon, was a competitor as well, and reports prepared from intercepts were forwarded to Raytheon.<55>
In September 1993, President Clinton asked the CIA to spy on Japanese auto manufacturers that were designing zero-emission cars and to forward that information to the Big Three US car manufacturers: Ford, General Motors and Chrysler.<56> In 1995, the New York Times reported that the NSA and the CIA’s Tokyo station were involved in providing detailed information to US Trade Representative Mickey Kantor’s team of negotiators in Geneva facing Japanese car companies in a trade dispute.<57> Recently, a Japanese newspaper, Mainichi, accused the NSA of continuing to monitor the communications of Japanese companies on behalf of American companies.<58>
Insight Magazine reported in a series of articles in 1997 that President Clinton ordered the NSA and FBI to mount a massive surveillance operation at the 1993 Asian/Pacific Economic Conference (APEC) hosted in Seattle. One intelligence source for the story related that over 300 hotel rooms had been bugged for the event, which was designed to obtain information regarding oil and hydro-electric deals pending in Vietnam that were passed on to high level Democratic Party contributors competing for the contracts.<59> But foreign companies were not the only losers: when Vietnam expressed interest in purchasing two used 737 freighter aircraft from an American businessman, the deal was scuttled after Commerce Secretary Ron Brown arranged favorable financing for two new 737s from Boeing.<60>
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In all honesty, it might help to be a little more open minded... free thinking. Don't always have a canned response to what you think the truth is. Be more accepting to alternative viewpoints, and don't stereotype people because they might present new ideas.
That's really not that hard to do... is it?
Have a nice day... :hi: I'm going for a long walk on the beach with my beautiful wife. It is a good day.
Dr. Truth (aka fenderpuddy)
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." - Gandhi
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