Do you think this has anything to do with FCC decisions of the past few years?
From today's Times
:
"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 if they have access to 'streams' of communications from the Tier 1 Points Of Presecne (POPs) of the major carriers, basically they're packet snooping on the voice and data traffic of a large portion of the country. Yes, probably something greater than 99.9% is sniffed and ignored, but that's a guess and I could be wrong. Point is it's sniffed in the first place, in warentless fashion, and that kind of data mining even if approved by a warrant would set a frightening precedent.
And buried later in the story...
"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."
Now that I know this was a vast and sweeping data mining operation, I actually feel a little better. Civil liberties violations divided by 290 million must be a smaller number than civil liberties violations divided by, say, American Muslims and the residents of Berkley. And all this time I thought baby Powell was just a lackey for the ILECs while all along he was actually a lackey for Cheney.