And W's arrogance gets worse & worse, this is nothing short of appalling, and the fact that major communications carriers were so willing to spread their legs at the drop of an Administrative hat is just as vile

HUGE Update in this post

bypass registration with www.bugmenot.com

Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

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Officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have knowledge of parts of the program say the N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said.

This so-called "pattern analysis" on calls within the United States would, in many circumstances, require a court warrant if the government wanted to trace who calls whom.

And here's where these companies rolled over for the Administration

A former technology manager at a major telecommunications company said that since the Sept. 11 attacks, the leading companies in the industry have been storing information on calling patterns and giving it to the federal government to aid in tracking possible terrorists.

"All that data is mined with the cooperation of the government and shared with them, and since 9/11, there's been much more active involvement in that area," said the former manager, a telecommunications expert who did not want his name or that of his former company used because of concern about revealing trade secrets.

Good Christ almighty, anyone want to explain, logically, how purely domestic communications WEREN'T spied upon, the communications that are supposedly strictly forbidden to be intercepted?

Several officials said that after President Bush's order authorizing the N.S.A. program, senior government officials arranged with officials of some of the nation's largest telecommunications companies to gain access to switches that act as gateways at the borders between the United States' communications networks and international networks. The identities of the corporations involved could not be determined.

The switches are some of the main arteries for moving voice and some Internet traffic into and out of the United States, and, with the globalization of the telecommunications industry in recent years, many international-to-international calls are also routed through such American switches.

One outside expert on communications privacy who previously worked at the N.S.A. said that to exploit its technological capabilities, the American government had in the last few years been quietly encouraging the telecommunications industry to increase the amount of international traffic that is routed through American-based switches.

Impeach this jerkoff ASAP, and I predict it will happen within two years, TOPS


UPDATED

Good Goddamned Almighty, this is CLEARLY beyond the pale

Spy net may pull in all U.S. calls overseas

The National Security Agency, in carrying out President Bush's order to intercept the international phone calls and e-mails of Americans suspected of links to al-Qaida, has probably been using computers to monitor all other Americans' international communications as well, according to specialists familiar with the workings of the NSA.

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The Bush administration formally defended its domestic spying program in a letter to Congress late Thursday, saying the nation's security outweighs privacy concerns of individuals who are monitored.

Excuse my obtuseness, but W's right takes precedence over EVERYONE'S foreign comunications, so the Bill of Rights is now just a Bill of Suggestions?

And just how would all that info get analyzed, and just how many calls or other forms of comunications can be monitored at any one time?

The Bush administration and the NSA have declined to provide details about the program the president authorized in 2001, but specialists said the agency serves as a vast data collection and sorting operation. It captures reams of data from satellites, fiber-optic lines and Internet switching stations and then uses a computer to check for names, numbers and words that have been identified as suspicious.

"The whole idea of the NSA is intercepting huge streams of communications, taking in 2 million pieces of communications an hour," said James Bamford, the author of two books on the NSA, who was the first to reveal the inner workings of the secret agency.

So President Jr has the right to listen in & spy on all communications huh?

Explain how that makes him the best person to uphold our Constitutional protections, as opposed to the clearly incompetent hack unable to perform to the standards & skills the office of President requires

Until this point, I've always thought the argument that W was trying to establish a dictatorship was hyperbole, a rhetorical flourish

Now, I'm convinced that President Jr may actually be trying to establish just such a reality, and when that's combined with the clear illegality of monitoring purely domestic communications, a very harsh picture of W's true nature shows itself

President Jr is secrecy obsessed, he's done more to restrict the Public's Right To Know than any President before him, while at the same time, insisting that all the citizens in the US be open for his perusal at any time he chooses

"The collection of this data by automated means creates new privacy risks," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.....Among the risks, he said, is that the spy agency's computers will collect personal information that has no bearing on national security and that intelligence agents programming those computers will be tempted to abuse their power to eavesdrop for personal or political gain.

Hey, here's a fun thought

What if some al-Qaeda sympathizer in our Government gets access to this info, there's your ultimate irony

Bush and his aides have declined to answer questions about the spying program, other than to insist that it was legal. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales this week said the program only targeted messages "where we have a reasonable basis to conclude" that one of the parties is affiliated with al-Qaida.

So up to 2 million calls an hour can be monitored without a warrant needed for 3 days, and yet it's reasonable to conclude that ALL of those calls are al-Qaeda related?

And one more sentence is really worth bearing out here, especially considering that under W, evidence gathered during the course of an investigation is no longer disposed of, even if no charges are filed or the person investigated has done nothing wrong, this goes COMPLETELY against "Innocent unlss proven Guilty"

The administration has not revealed how long the NSA stores messages.

Impeach this fuckwit NOW!!!