NYTimes: NSA domestic spying much broader than White House said
by PsiFighter37
Fri Dec 23, 2005 at 11:47:46 PM PDT
Well, I'll be damned. Even though Bush has admitted to spying within the country illegally using the NSA, it appears that the program is much larger than originally thought:
WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 - The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials
The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.
What follows is exactly the problem when you have corporations too tied into the government:
As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.
The article ends with a note from a computer engineer:
Phil Karn, a computer engineer and technology expert at a major West Coast telecommunications company, said access to such switches would be significant. "If the government is gaining access to the switches like this, what you're really talking about is the capability of an enormous vacuum operation to sweep up data," he said.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/12/24/14746/603http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/24/politics/24spy.html?ei=5094&en=7e76956223502390&hp=&ex=1135486800&adxnnl=1&partner=homepage&adxnnlx=1135425951-ARBWqIqEnx4N2wiyiktvFA
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