Fortunately, they'd never similarly abuse the vast financial power that we just handed over to them.

Right?

Arrgh! Osama bin Laden!!!!!!

That should put everybody back in their places for a while!

As I read this, I'm reminded of George Carlin's story of a friend who believed his phone was being tapped by the FBI, and began answering his phone, "Fuck Hoover!"

I dont know if it was a service glitch or not, but I just had an incident in a call from here to Scotland. We could hear another conversation on the line and they could here us. All four of us talked to each other directly when it happened incredulous that we could listen to a totally separate call. We all immediately hung up.

There is no question that there have been gross abuses of power foisted upon the Citizenry of the Republic, but the great question of out time should be: What actual guarantee do we, the People, have that these abuse surveillance abilities will not remain in the hands of the Bushylvanians, once they leave office? Given that Bush and Putin are more alike than most have ever realized, we may have to spend millions---if not more---just removing the spiders from the national electronics-communications structure....

We shouldn't have expected anything else from the Bush administration. The real crime was Nancy Pelosi taking impeachment off the table. Once she did that, with Bush's Constitutional power to issue pardons, the administration had carte blanche to commit any crime.

Pelosi must go.

Peace activist Cindy Sheehan is running as an independent for Pelosi's seat. Send money to Sheehan's campaign:
http://www.cindyforcongress.org
And then send a letter to Pelosi's office telling her what you did and why.

We will never climb out of the hole left by the Republicans unless we have a Democratic leadership that is at least as afraid of their progressive base as they are of the Republicans.

Now that we know that there have been abuses, does anyone think that our Congress will reign in the executive branch and return our privacy rights? It is so easy for them to take our rights away, but how do we get them back?

What most people fail to realize is that they're doing massive dumps of DIGITAL information. The conversations they are listening to aren't in real time, but are digital files that remain forever (unless all copies are deleted) and can be accessed and manipulated through various databases.

It will be extremely difficult to eliminate this data and there is a strong probability that much of this information could be in private hands (i.e., the GOP).

I just don't think the Dems (including Obama) who voted in favor of the FISA amendment really thought about this for very long.

"About how NSA eavesdropping was targeted solely at suspected terrorists, and that law-abiding Americans had nothing to worry about?"

I guess you could say that if they were being monitored, then by definition they were suspects. See how easy it is?

And besides, none of those hundreds of people actually got arrested or assassinated or sent to Guantanamo, so what's the problem? I'm sure none of their data will end up in a longterm database, and I'm sure that no one's free speech or personal relationships will be chilled by knowing that the NSA is listening.

Plus, as Glenn Greenwald points out, these are only two low level NSA people admitting what they saw. The full, true, and total scale of the spying undertaken by the Bush Administration is not yet known. This is undoubtedly only a small piece of shit.

This is Stasi-style stuff.

Mr. Benen, you really shouldn't be reading that communist trash. Hey, what's that funny looking, um, toy looking thing peeking out from under your mattress? I'll need to speak with your employers about these matters. Secretly of course. And if those knuckleheds tell you about our meetings I'll throw them in jail. You better watch your ass mister, I have my eye on you......

How long will it be before the right-wing noise machine starts challenging the patriotism of the NSA whistleblowers? Not long I would imagine - - how dare they put the country at risk by disclosing the fact that our government was evesdropping on personal conversations, and that the individuals doing so were passing-around the "spicy bits."
My fondest hope is that Blowhard O'Reilly picks up the story in the way suggested above, and we have the pleasure of contemplating an ass who participated in phone sex defending those who evesdrop on same.

Gracious said:
It is so easy for them to take our rights away, but how do we get them back?

See my earlier comment.

But also, we need to change how we think about privacy. Face it, once our information is in a computer, anyone with the expertise is able to access it.

With enough money, Gracious, I could find out the Social Security numbers of you and everyone in your family. I could get your bank account numbers, your credit card numbers and your utility account numbers. With your debit and credit card numbers I could find out what internet sites you visit and learn everything you've purchased with your cards. With an inexpensive scanner I could sit outside your house and listen in on all calls from your cell phone or your cordless landline phone. I can even find out where your kids go to school.

The privacy horse is already out of the barn.

In 1998, when they learned about IRS employees accessing the tax returns of friends, family and celebrities, Congress passed the Internal Revenue Service Restructuring and Reform Act. The new law made it a crime with automatic termination to access tax information without proper authorization. We need a similar law for all personal data. Here is my proposal:

1) Any government employee who accesses private information without proper authorization will be fired and permanently barred from working for the federal government.

2) Any government employee who accesses private information and then reveals it to others would be terminated and lose the usual immunity from civil suits that government employees enjoy.

3) Any government employee who accesses private information and reveals it for political purposes would be subject to a mandatory sentence of six months in jail.

Good Idea Steve T. but where are the courageous lawmakers who will support those ideas? More has to change in this election than just getting Obama elected. Remember that he voted for the new FISA bill.

Good Idea Steve T. but where are the courageous lawmakers who will support those ideas? More has to change in this election than just getting Obama elected. Remember that he voted for the new FISA bill.

Imagine that. Hand over excessive and largely unchecked surveillance powers to the Bush administration, and gross abuses become commonplace. Who could have guessed?

To be fair, these are the same people who thought the financial markets could regulate themselves because no one would ever put the markets in jeopardy just to make a short-term profit, right?

"Jonathon Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University, told ABC, "This story is to surveillance law what Abu Ghraib was to prison law.""

This comparison doesn't make a lot of sense to me, except maybe in a very narrow legal sense. Abu Ghraib involved people getting tortured and in some cases killed, and here we are talking about phone calls. I am horrified by the abuses of the current administration, but this leaves me cold. What is the principle here? That surveillance without limits is A-OK if the targets are non-citizens, but that any instance of an American citizen being overheard is somehow the crime of the century? Really?

We have on the one hand the dystopian Rumsfeldian vision of a world divided into two zones, America, and the remainder of the globe as a lawless free-fire zone where people can be zapped by unmanned drones, abducted, disappeared, tortured, and monitored on a massive scale. And the response from the American left is that this is OK as long as we find a way to make sure that no precious US citizen ever gets caught up in this?

The government has now taken economic control over our major financial institutions. Our government conducts domestic spying and places peaceful protesters on terrorist watch lists. Protesters are banned from GOP political rallies and meetings with the GOP candidates. Messages to the press are carefully managed. We even have the equivalent of a party-controlled news service (Fox News).

I think George Bush saw more than we realized when he stared into Putin's soul eight years ago.

What's wrong with spying? I spied on my board, and they gave me $45 million.

Maybe if we did more spying, we wouldn't be in this financial crisis!

To TS:

"We have on the one hand the dystopian Rumsfeldian vision of a world divided into two zones, America, and the remainder of the globe as a lawless free-fire zone where people can be zapped by unmanned drones, abducted, disappeared, tortured, and monitored on a massive scale. And the response from the American left is that this is OK as long as we find a way to make sure that no precious US citizen ever gets caught up in this?"

That is a completely ridiculous statement. Is the "American Left" solely responsible for U.S. policy? I don't think you will find many on the "American Left" that condone "a lawless free-fire zone where people can be zapped by unmanned drones, abducted, disappeared, tortured, and monitored on a massive scale." But in this country we have this thing called the opposition, and they've been running things for the past eight years. We try to make inroads where we can and hopefully a lot of progress will be made in the next four years.

Please don't project approval of all of government's recent mistakes onto the "American Left" because we haven't had real control over these issues lately.

1) Any government employee who accesses private information without proper authorization will be fired and permanently barred from working for the federal government. -- Steve T, @13:22

That one's simple. Just give blanket authorization to every government employee in that segment and, presto-chango!, it's perfectly legal. What, do you think, is that recently passed "amendment", which allows FBI to listen to everyone *without* having to prove any cause/suspicion. Just on their own say so/whim?

I have no quarrel with the fact that the Bush administration has f***ed this country into the ground with its kremlin-like tactics (or is it a strategy?) and incessant fear mongering.

However, the story is about intercepting phone conversations from off-shore to on-shore. Which is not as big of a deal as the intercepting of domestic to domestic communications. Which was what folks were originally indignant about.

Then again, considering that they've assumed control of the banking system and will be buying up our houses and deploying soldiers in the streets, maybe they really don't want any Americans abroad telling those at home what is really going on (since the truth will be filtered by a complicit media).

For $19.95 you too can own real time authentic phone sex conversations from desperate soldier brides. Hear David and Lisa discuss their last night together, hear red cross volunteers volunteer their favorite fantasies caught in live phone conversations.

All of this from only "2" whistleblowers. Imagine if we knew what they all collected. What do big mouths like Liebermann and Graham say about this story? Even those trying to convince us that this wasn't happening knew they were lying when they made those claims.

Once again it demonstrates that Republicans cannot be trusted and neither can the DINOs that supported them. For 8 yrs now these underlying flunkies like from "Liberty" U etc managed to get into low level positions to keep all this corruption going especially in the judiciary and it will take years to denazify our government's agencies and this privatized army and our privatized security and intelligence organizations. It was so obvious that this is where privatization was leading that I can't help but wonder why it took us so long to see how the profiteering of the taxpayer dollar was and is destroying our democracy. An efficient government works only when it is "our" government and not belonging to private parties.

How much more does it take to convince voters that republicans and their DINO supporters have got to go. The republican party has been poisoned and refuses all antidotes. They have even set out to ruin the elections in '08 (hoping for riots so martial law can be invoked).

Bush/McCain have lied about everything...there is nothing they would not do to gain power.

One hand washes the other. Congress, Dems...maybe even the Supreme Court...they're all in it.

The sheeple don't care, except for political blog writers and forum habitues. Some politicians who were initially concerned about the Bill of Rights looked at polls and decided the Bill of Rights wasn't really all that important. I've tried to engage some average Americans in the issue, and they don't care.

bdop4: I never said that the left is responsible for this! I also don't think they really approve of this, but I am afraid there are a lot of otherwise reasonable people on the left and in the center who are willing to accept (not approve!) such an arrangement as long as they are excluded from the consequences.

I think that emphasizing the citizenship angle in these stories is a very doubled-edged sword. On the one hand, it may be politically smart to point out that even citizens can fall under this surveillance, so that people take notice. But on the other hand, if privacy is a valuable good to try to preserve, then the privacy of citizens of other countries should also be considered on some level. (I am willing to make compromises here, as long as the comprise is not absolute privacy for US citizens and no privacy whatsoever for everyone else.)

To put it more bluntly, as long as these abuses happen, whether surveillance or detentions, I hope that they also happen to US citizens. Because if they don't, few people in the US will care much, except for a few groups such as ai, aclu, et that I certainly admire and support.

And like those who tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib, these incidences will be dismissed as outliers, aberrations. Scapegoats will be punished, but little if anything will change.

One of NSA's governing directives specifically prohibits NSA collection against U.S. persons. The mission at Fort Gordon has had a blanket Attorney General waiver of that directive since 2001.