NSA's Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Front page, above the fold, long. Rupert might surprise you.

NSA's Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data

Terror Fight Blurs
Line Over Domain;
Tracking Email
By SIOBHAN GORMAN
March 10, 2008; Page A1

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans' privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But the data-sifting effort didn't disappear. 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.

Congress now is hotly debating domestic spying powers under the main law governing U.S. surveillance aimed at foreign threats. An expansion of those powers expired last month and awaits renewal, which could be voted on in the House of Representatives this week. The biggest point of contention over the law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, is whether telecommunications and other companies should be made immune from liability for assisting government surveillance.

[Canuckistanian]

1. So, Poindexter's TIA lives after all

And to think we thought it had been eliminated.

http://www.citizinemag.com/politics/politics-0302_feingold.htm

[tom_paine]

2. Bushies NEVER take "no" for an answer. They change the name, go underground

and keep doing what they're doing in the most extreme cases where public/political backlash forces them to.

But never never NEVER assume they have stopped or even slowed any criminal activity, not for a second.

I am on DUs archive for at least five years saying just that about Total Information Awareness and anything else of the handful of things they have pretended to "shut down" over public outrage these last seven years.

Sadly, I also predicted that same five years ago that eventually it would come to this. Like Putin's Russia or Communist China, no opoosition party member, especially if they are prominent or dangerous to Bushie Tyrants, can even jaywalk.

Meanwhile, coke whores, child molestation parties, it's anything goes for whatever depravities the Bushies wish to conduct, safe in the knowledge that no Loyal Bushie in the now criminalized DOJ will ever touch them.

The Old American Republic is SO OVER. We ARE Putin's Russia. We ARE Commie China. No doubt about it. This merely signals that we are getting closer and closer to whatever the Bushies have for the Penultimate and Final Solutions to the Liberal Problem. We are now DEEP into the Middle Pahse of the transition of our nation to the New Totalitarian Tyranny pioneeered by Comrades Bush and Putin.

It doesn't have a name because it is still busy pretending it is a Constituional Republic. But our tyranny abornin has as little to do with the Old American Republic as Nazi Germany had to do with Weimar.

So sad. So over. No way back except that which will make it worse.