NSA

The NSA wouldn't spy on phone calls unless they were a threat to national security - right? Guess again:

Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia.

"These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones," said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA's Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003.

Kinne described the contents of the calls as "personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism."

She said US military officers, American journalists and American aid workers were routinely intercepted and "collected on" as they called their offices or homes in the United States.

So they do this for enjoyment and some comic relief? I don't take our constitution as being some kind of joke, yet people charged with protecting this country from another 9/11 do. If they "hate us for our freedoms", then these people just gave Osama another victory in the war on terror.

The WSJ has an interesting article explaining how the NSA has been increasing their spying power. One thing I found really interesting was at the start of the article:

Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans' privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But the data-sifting effort didn't disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system.

The central role the NSA has come to occupy in domestic intelligence gathering has never been publicly disclosed. But an inquiry reveals that its efforts have evolved to reach more broadly into data about people's communications, travel and finances in the U.S. than the domestic surveillance programs brought to light since the 2001 terrorist attacks

So what the NSA is doing was basically killed by Congress five years ago. Yeah - if they won't let one agency do it, just have another agency pick it up. This is just another example of how Bush has no respect for the law, the Constitution or this country.

Al Qaeda won the war on terror. It's over. They knew Americans were a bunch of over reactionary twits and would destroy this country after their attacks on 9/11. Their biggest ally was, and still is, George W. Bush. America should be ashamed to have given in to the terrorists so easily.