According to an article in today's New York Times, the National Security Agency's Bush-mandated program of spying on us without court warrants is more widespread than what Bush ("Mr. Freedom-is-on-the-march") has acknowledged.
This new information is very disturbing, but (sadly) not surprising.
Our privacy is a thing of the past.
From Reuters via MSNBC:
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The volume of information gathered from telephone and Internet communications by the National Security Agency without court-approved warrants was much larger than the White House has acknowledged, The New York Times reported Saturday.
Citing current and former government officials, the 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.
A former telecommunications technology manager told the Times that industry leaders have been storing information on calling patterns and giving it to the federal government to aid in tracking possible terrorists since the Sept. 11 attacks.
[...]
President Bush and his aides have said his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to monitoring international phone and e-mail communications linked to people with connections to al-Qaida. What has not been acknowledged, according to the Times, is that NSA technicians combed large amounts of phone and Internet traffic seeking patterns pointing to terrorism suspects.
[...]
Some officials described the program as a large data mining operation, the Times said, and described it as much larger than the White House has acknowledged.
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