Bob Blakely <Bob@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > I've been in this business for a long time now. The NSA does not > monitor US phones. Period. Your information is out of date, and you seem to have accepted the official story covering earlier times. Maybe the official story of earlier times is true, but the *official story* right now is that the NSA is monitoring conversations involving phones in the United States. "After the September 11 attacks, Bush authorized the National Security Agency to monitor the international telephone calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens without first obtaining warrants as a means of tracking al Qaeda operations." <http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-02-03T221136Z_01_N03281239_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-EAVESDROPPING.xml> "he president also answered critics of the controversial National Security Administration (NSA) program permitting warrantless surveillance of overseas communications to and from the United States." <http://www.timesherald.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=16041869&BRD=1672&PAG=461&dept_id=33380&rfi=6> "Insisting once again that NSA covert eavesdropping is legal, the president signaled that he would oppose congressional attempts to change the program if the effort appears likely to compromise the program launched in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks." <http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/politics/20060126-1505-cnsbush.html> "Gonzales and other officials, for example, have repeatedly said that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which governs secret surveillance in the United States, is too cumbersome to be applied to the NSA eavesdropping program. " <http://freeinternetpress.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=5677> "Owing to the globalization of telecommunications, many telephone calls between parties in foreign countries or with an American at one end are routed through American networks. By analyzing this traffic, the NSA has been gathering clues to possible terrorist activities." <http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/30/opinion/edbobbitt.php> And so on ad infinitum. The NSA is actively involved in monitoring phone conversations on phones in the United States. This has been *all over* the news for the last few weeks. And they've probably really been doing it for decades, as part of the Echelon program, although the official position was that it was illegal then. I've seen with my own eyes the banks of tape recorders at Ft. Meade (nearly 20 years ago now) recording Echelon captures. It's widely believed that that included any domestic phone traffic sent via microwave (a lot more of it then than now) and all overseas traffic and a lot of totally non-US traffic that for various reasons happened to go through US switches. -- David Dyer-Bennet, <mailto:dd-b@xxxxxxxx>, <http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/> RKBA: <http://noguns-nomoney.com/> <http://www.dd-b.net/carry/> Pics: <http://dd-b.lighthunters.net/> <http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/> Dragaera/Steven Brust: <http://dragaera.info/>
