I've seen the words 'warrentless wiretaps' being used all over the media to describe the illegal domestic monitoring that is being conducted by the NSA. What we're dealing with here are not wiretaps but a vast electronic information gathering system to sift and scan all manner of electronic communications traffic. The terms 'warrentless wiretaps' or 'domestic spying' are just not sufficient to describe what the NSA has been doing.
Given the scope of the system, I would suspect that millions of US citizens have been illegally spied upon by our government.
If anyone wants to see a good description of the type of system that the NSA has been using to illegally monitor us please visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/...
more below......
I'll bet that the NSA has been using some version or derivative of the Echalon system coupled with some kind of risk profiling scorecard to provide so-called 'leads' or exception reports.
Vastly scaled down systems of the sort used by the NSA are now being used by large corporations to provide 'continuous monitoring' of their computer systems for instances of fraud. These automated systems dynamically scan all activity on computer networks to provide 'execption reports' which are then further investigated manually. In the corporate setting the problem tends to be that too many 'exception reports' are produced and the manual investigators get deluged with data. From what we hear anecdotally in the news, it seems that the same thing may be happening with the information being produced by the NSA.
Some of the questions we need our senators to ask are:
- Specifically what activities are monitored? I would assume that all phone calls, emails, faxes, satellite transmissions, websites visited etc. are routinely monitored. However, there is also some suspicion that the NSA may be able to conduct monitoring of data as it is actually being typed into computer
- How many American citizens were caught up in its net?
- How many of those Americans caught up in the net, how many were flagged as 'exception reports'?
- How many of those 'exception reports' were subjected to further investigation?
- How many of those investigated were arrested?
- How many of those arrested were prosecuted?
- We also need the the identities of those Americans caught up in this illegal spying program so that they may pursue further action in the courts.
Comments?