The U.S Information Awareness Office,
under the National Security Agency, intercepts, records, and stores all telephone conversations, emails, online chats, and other forms of communication. It may seem surreal, but as was mentioned here some time ago in a discussion of the huge new NSA data center soon to open in Utah, the USA is now a surveillance state.
Following 9/11, unprecedented power expansions were granted NSA, which is supposed to surveil only extra-national chatter:
There have been some previous indications that this is true. Former AT&T engineer Mark Klein revealed that AT&T and other telecoms had built a special network that allowed the National Security Agency full and unfettered access to data about the telephone calls and the content of email communications for all of their customers. Specifically, Klein explained "that the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T" and that "contrary to the government's depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists . . . much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic." But his amazing revelations were mostly ignored and, when Congress retroactively immunized the nation's telecom giants for their participation in the illegal Bush spying programs, Klein's claims (by design) were prevented from being adjudicated in court.
As this is an Executive Branch activity, it has little (if any) oversight. Beginning in 2010, the massive data collection on US citizens drew concern from members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, as The New York Times reported in March of last year:
WASHINGTON — For more than two years, a handful of Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee have warned that the government is secretly interpreting its surveillance powers under the Patriot Act in a way that would be alarming if the public — or even others in Congress — knew about it.
On Thursday, two of those senators —Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado — went further. They said a top-secret intelligence operation that is based on that secret legal theory is not as crucial to national security as executive branch officials have maintained.The mantra of the Left, as articulated throughout much of his time in office by Barky, is that It's All Bush's Fault. And to the extent that this began under Dubya, they're correct. However, as has so often been the case in the Barky administration, operations have been dramatically enhanced in scope: today, it's estimated that they intercept and store some 1.7 billion (yes, that's with a "b") communications among US citizens each day.
Welcome to 1984. It just arrived a few years later than anticipated.
