WHAT THE NSA DOES IS SECRET? WELL, DUH!

[defrog]

ITEM [via Threat Level]: Long time readers of this blog and its predecessor, Go To Hell (the official zine of Team Frog International, etc) may remember our reports on the Bush Posse’s grand plan to stop terrorism in its tracks via a program called Total Information Awareness. You know – the one headed up by one of the guys convicted in the Iran Contra Scandal that basically proposed creating one big-ass database that would let the NSA spy on everyone via the Internets and have a big creepy Illuminati logo like this?



Then the Liberal Media went and blabbed about it because of some stupid privacy issues and Congress killed funding for it? Yes. That one.

Well, the Wall Street Journal reports that the NSA pretty much went ahead and built it anyway, in secret (it’s the NSA – secret’s what they do) and has been using it to pretty much gather data on everyone.

Not that this is news. The National Journal broke that story two years ago.

But given that the Bush Posse is screaming at Congress to legalize all this before another 9/11 happens – and lying their ass off in the process – the following information is probably relevant to the discussion:

The Administration did not simply decide to warrantlessly wiretap a few thousand people using wiretaps inside the United States. Instead they ran every American through their algorithms, searching for targets in our phone calls and internet searches, trying to make sense of who called who, in order to find some sleeper cell inside the United States. The FBI was seemingly complicit -- and began its own or related data-mining of Americans' social networks -- even as its agents complained of getting thousands of bogus leads from the NSA.

Oh, right. What discussion?

Never mind. Carry on.

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