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February 09, 2006
Even Scarier News About White House Surveillance Programs
This Christian Science Monitor article shows how the warrantless wiretapping scandal is just the tip of the iceberg. The whole reason the Bush administration couldn't go through the FISA court is that their plans go far, far beyond surveilling people who are "talkin' to Al Queda." The goal pretty clearly is to sweep up as much information as possible from all available sources, with no regard for "probable cause," then use "data mining" technology to sift through it. This technology can be used to keep track of terror threats - or to spy on and harass political opponents, just as J. Edgar Hoover and the Nixon White House (home of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld) did to Martin Luther King, John Lennon, and many other civil rights and anti-war activists.
This system is more or less what John Poindexter proposed in 2002 with his "Total Information Awareness" program. (Poindexter is the same guy who was convicted in 1990 for lying to congress and destroying evidence about the Iran-Contra program. The conviction was overturned in 1991 "on the grounds that the prosecution's evidence may have been tainted by exposure to Poindexter's testimony before the joint House-Senate committee investigating the matter, in which Poindexter's testimony was compelled by a grant of 'use immunity'.") At the time, the TIA program was publicly shot down and disavowed. The creepy Illuminati-esque logo couldn't have helped:
But now, it seems pretty clear that behind the scenes, the Bush administration has continued to work on this plan all along.
This should scare Republicans as much as Democrats. Eventually, there will be a Dem in the White House again. Would Republicans want Dems to have that kind of power? Hopefully, the libertarian wing of the Republican party - the Cato Institute crowd - will come to their senses and conclude that this kind of stuff is far more dangerous and frightening than their usual bugaboos like environmental regulation and higher marginal tax rates.
US plans massive data sweep | csmonitor.com
Posted by tedf at February 9, 2006 01:57 PM
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