Well, I'll be damned. Even though Bush has admitted to spying within the country illegally using the NSA, it appears that the program is
much larger than originally thought:
WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 - The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.
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.
What follows is exactly the problem when you have corporations too tied into the government:
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.
So apparently, telecommunications companies in the private sector are giving the government unfettered access to all communications?! Big Brother, indeed. Even worse, even people within NSA admit that what they're doing essentially amounts to a "large data-mining operation". Basically, they're combing through everything - not just specified targets, as the Bush administration has been claiming, but they've been going through all communications in search for possible terrorists.
It's also noted that these kinds of programs such as this require court warrants:
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.
The use of similar data-mining operations by the Bush administration in other contexts has raised strong objections, most notably in connection with the Total Information Awareness system, developed by the Pentagon for tracking terror suspects, and the Department of Homeland Security's Capps program for screening airline passengers. Both programs were ultimately scrapped after public outcries over possible threats to privacy and civil liberties.
The article ends with a note from a computer engineer:
Phil Karn, a computer engineer and technology expert at a major West Coast telecommunications company, said access to such switches would be significant. "If the government is gaining access to the switches like this, what you're really talking about is the capability of an enormous vacuum operation to sweep up data," he said.
Basically, there is the potential for widespread invasions of privacy on innocent people through this program, which basically sweeps through everything. It's disgraceful that our government is running roughshod over our constitutionally protected right to privacy, and it's even more shameful that corporations are aiding the Bush administration in their illegal schemes.
[Update]: Reading Digby's take, along with campskunk's comment on this development led me to look at a program called TIA. Known as Total Information Awareness (also called Terrorism Information Awareness), its main purpose seems very similar to what NSA is apparently doing now:
TIA purported to capture the "information signature" of people so that the government could track potential terrorists and criminals involved in "low-intensity/low-density" forms of warfare and crime. The goal was to track individuals through collecting as much information about them as possible and using computer algorithms and human analysis to detect potential activity.
The project called for the development of "revolutionary technology for ultra-large all-source information repositories," which would contain information from multiple sources to create a "virtual, centralized, grand database." This database would be populated by transaction data contained in current databases such as financial records, medical records, communication records, and travel records as well as new sources of information. Also fed into the database would be intelligence data.
While funding for TIA was eliminated in September 2003 in HR 2658, it seems as though other branches of the government, such as the FBI and the TSA have been attempting to develop similar data-mining programs.
I would encourage all of you to visit the Electronic Privacy Information Center's page on TIA. It gives a fairly comprehensive explanation about TIA, along with various documents. I would point out one paragraph that struck me as a little disheartening, to say the least:
New documents show that General Wesley Clark, a lobbyist for commercial data company Acxiom, met with former Total Information Awareness developer, Admiral John Poindexter in May and June 2002. Previously obtained documents from the same time period indicate that Acxiom was considered as a source of personal information for a government "mega-scale database."
I know the General is on our side (and, for full disclosure, I'm still undecided about who should be our presidential nominee in 2008, but I'm leaning towards Finegold at the moment), but I'm still unsettled by the fact that he was apparently lobbying for a company that was involved in TIA, which, by all means, appears to be an earlier incarnation of what the NSA is doing now.