Well, actual people didn't actually break down doors to get to information they had no right to. It was done with computers instead with successive presidents, Bush and Obama, effectively standing outside the Watergate entrance on the sidewalk -- or maybe sitting in a car parked at the curb --while the data was collected.
No FISA judge intervened. The top judge was informed of the act(s) but not fully informed. In return, he (she?) allowed this to slip through the net with a mere renewal of a "bulk order" every three months.
This extensive snooping began in 2001 and only came to an end two years into the Obama administration. If then.
According to a top-secret draft report by the NSA's inspector general – published for the first time today by the Guardian – the agency began "collection of bulk internet metadata" involving "communications with at least one communicant outside the United States or for which no communicant was known to be a citizen of the United States".
Eventually, the NSA gained authority to "analyze communications metadata associated with United States persons and persons believed to be in the United States", according to a 2007 Justice Department memo, which is marked secret.
The Guardian revealed earlier this month that the NSA was collecting the call records of millions of US Verizon customers under a Fisa court order that, it later emerged, is renewed every 90 days. Similar orders are in place for other phone carriers. ...The Guardian
If all of that isn't enough to make you question the bona fides of NSA, its employees and its bosses -- right up the line to the top -- then you need a refresher course in history, liberty and integrity. For additional weirdness, look at the Pentagon's reaction to the Guardian's report, as reported in CNet:
The U.S. Army has apparently opted to restrict Army personnel access to The Guardian's Web site after the newspaper broke stories about the National Security Agency's confidential surveillance activities.
The Army is filtering "some access to press coverage and online content about the NSA leaks," Gordon Van Vleet, a spokesman for the Army Network Enterprise Technology Command, told the Monterey Herald. NETCOM is charged with operating and defending the Army's computer networks. ...CNet
That may be due to the revelation, in Guardian, that the Pentagon was on the side of increased, not decreased spying, on Americans.
Of course, as we're reminded again, the data revealed about Americans online is merely "metadata" -- that is, who sent the email on what date and who received it -- not the content of the message. Wait!, says the Guardian:
But email metadata is different. Customers' data bills do not itemize online activity by detailing the addresses a customer emailed or the IP addresses from which customer devices accessed the internet.
Internal government documents describe how revealing these email records are. One 2008 document, signed by the US defense secretary and attorney general, states that the collection and subsequent analysis included "the information appearing on the 'to,' 'from' or 'bcc' lines of a standard email or other electronic communication" from Americans.
In reality, it is hard to distinguish email metadata from email content. Distinctions that might make sense for telephone conversations and data about those conversations do not always hold for online communications.
"The calls you make can reveal a lot, but now that so much of our lives are mediated by the internet, your IP [internet protocol] logs are really a real-time map of your brain: what are you reading about, what are you curious about, what personal ad are you responding to (with a dedicated email linked to that specific ad), what online discussions are you participating in, and how often?" said Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute.
"Seeing your IP logs – and especially feeding them through sophisticated analytic tools – is a way of getting inside your head that's in many ways on par with reading your diary," Sanchez added. ...The Guardian
Maybe a lot of Americans' first reactions to this will be like mine: "Welcome to the inside of my head. Let me know if you can make more sense of the composting going on in there than I can!" And, of course, most of us have nothing to hide except stuff super spies would find boring: "I lied about my weight and also I told Pat someone else had dented the Toyota while it was parked."
What I do want to know is more about the chain-of-command inside the White House and whether President Obama allowed this inherited program to slip by for two years or whether he effectively reauthorized it.
Not to mention who among the Democrats knew about it in Congress. It is almost impossible to pull Congressional Republicans away from anti-Constitutional excesses and flagrant disrespect for their job. Republicans have been responsible for criminally self-serving behaviors since before the Reagan administration. But as a voter, I want to know the full extent of the complicity of those representatives I tend to vote for.
