Have you Heard the One About the Digital Plumbers?
What an amusing set of spy-story dominoes John Aravosis set up and knocked over on his AMERICAblog this morning:
- At 12:42 am: "AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth giving the NSA the phone records of tens of millions of innocent Americans. Program goes far beyond what Bush claimed." — USAToday reports that the "limited" spying on domestic calls by the Bush administration was really much, much, much bigger than the administration claimed. According to one inside source: "The agency's goal is 'to create a database of every call ever made' within the nation's borders, this person added."
- At 11:26 am: Commentary called "Do you really trust George Bush to spy on you 'the right way'?" in which he addresses the bold-face question: Do you really trust George Bush to be competent enough to spy on all of your phone calls while at the same time protecting your privacy?
- At 11:50 am: In "Bush to speak at noon on newest domestic spying scandal" he predicts the prevarications that Bush will use to justify everything: "September 11 … limited program … leaks damage national security … it's all Clinton's fault."
- At 12:06 pm: "Bush's quick little speech to the nation defending his spying on all of your phone calls" and he's liveblogging the speech, demonstrating that his predictions were pretty much on the mark., expecially "First words, 'After September 11.'"
- At 12:25, sort of as a punchline to the morning in "CNN's David Ensor defends Bush domestic spying", he quotes this Ensor, "CNN's national security correspondent", as saying (my paraphrase): "Well, you probably won't find that these big companies broke any laws because, well, they're big companies and they've got lots of lawyers". (To state the obvious: big companies have lots of lawyers to defend them when they do what they want.)
For me the whole shaggy-dog story would be complete if only we referred to the spying technique not as "data mining" but as "data plumbing".
Digital plumbers! How nouveau Watergate!
[Addendum:]
At 6:03pm, in "Copy this and email it to your friends", John provides a transcript of remarks Jack Cafferty made today on CNN, from which I excerpt these words:
Shortly after 9-11, AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth began providing the super secret NSA with information on phone calls of millions of our citizens, all part of the war on terror, President Bush says.
[…]
The President rushed out this morning in the wake of this front page story in USA Today and he declared the government's doing nothing wrong and all of this is just fine.Is it? Is it legal?
Then why did the Justice Department suddenly drop its investigation of the warrantless spying on citizens? Because the NSA said Justice Department lawyers didn't have the necessary security clearance to do the investigation.
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I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Friday, 12 May 2006 at 01.56
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I should be doing a post on this, but I'm too angry about it right now. Plus, there's the aggravating realization it's really all been said before, been said all along.
With Bush as president, a thoroughly dissatisfied citizen has a daily experience like that of a motorist who has bought a lemon. The dealer can't/won't fix it or take it back. The manufacturer is no help. There's no getting rid of it without taking a huge loss. But day after day, week after week, it's never-ending grief to own and operate.
Maybe I'll do a post on this tomorrow. Ugh.
on Friday, 12 May 2006 at 12.15
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It is definitely angry making and there seems to be nothing particularly compelling to say, particularly when we've been so worn down by the multitude of W's little mendacities over the years, but it still seems that the best we can offer right now is to add our voices and hope the messages that we think are important will finally be heard.