Missing Link

As some of my friends, and my parents especially, know – I’ve been keeping fairly close tabs on the US Government’s NSA Domestic Spying debacle. To bring those of you who read my blog and don’t know what I’m talking about up to speed – the NSA has been conducting large scale dragnet style data mining of internet traffic over (at least) AT&T’s network backbone. This is also in conjunction with warrantless wiretapping of phone traffic as well. Bush acknowledged part of the operation but claimed he could bypass FISA courts whenever he wanted.

The story was broken open even wider a while back when a former AT&T internet technician turned over documents to the EFF that detailed the NSA’s wholesale taping of the Internet Backbone through AT&T’s Folsom Street office in San Francisco – the documents hinted at other such operations in other AT&T offices as well. The EFF filed a lawsuit against AT&T on the premise that AT&T violated federal law when it allowed the NSA warrantless access to their network. AT&T and the Government tried to get the case thrown out of court on the premise of state secrets – a move that practically admitted to everyone that the program was indeed real, and pissed off a lot of people who were paying attention and value the freedoms and liberties we as citizens are supposed to enjoy. The program marks a distinct shift from the “individual as a suspect” mentality that our federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies had been using before, to the “watch everyone, everyone is a suspect” mentality that generally leads down a bad road of totalitarianism and a “you’re either with us or you’re an enemy” view of the world. I pray it does not lead that way here.

So, why am I suddenly bringing this up? I read on BoingBoing earlier that a guy created a podcast of a PBS series called Frontline. Through this I found an episode called “Frontline: Spying on the Home Front” that is available online for people to watch (or through the podcast), and I thought “hey, I should tell people about this so they watch it and know what’s going on”. I’ve had several discussions with my dad about this topic, and despite being told about the internet spying issue, he has seemed to insist on believing that the government was simply capturing point to point communications involving known terror suspects ( which is the Bush administrations claim ) but he also seems to want to ignore the evidence presented that shows this goes way beyond taping of point to point communications and involves dragnet style sifting through data.

Does anybody else see what’s wrong with this?

[tags]NSA, AT&T, Illegal Wiretaping, Bush[/tags]