I guess times change. If this gets worse, it will be sad, but your cap may cease to be a good way of showing off your service during WW III (a.k.a. the Cold War).
Back during the row about Bush’s “warrantless wiretapping” we were given to believe that it was all directed at cross-border communications, and I defended the practice as falling under the President’s war power authority as signals intelligence. I still would, and would go so far as to hold that NSA collection of all available content and “metadata” of communications to, from and within any hostile nation or any region outside the U.S. which is known to harbor Al Qaeda cells whose communications cannot be directly targetted is appropriate under those same powers, with or without a FISA warrant or any other warrant. The fact that this would catch innocent phone calls made to relatives in Waziristan (for instance) is no more objectionable to American liberty than the fact that the innocent party making a dinner reservation at a restaurant, which unknown to him is a mob front and subject to a court-ordered wiretap, has his dinner plans overhead by the police.
However, blanket collection of data about communications, even just “metadata” within the U.S., is a very different matter — should the government really be able to know down to 100 foot resolution (or maybe better for smart-phones under some circumstances) where every cell-phone user in the country has been whenever he or she placed a phone call, and what number he or she was calling? I think not.
I may be older now, and disabled, but if some obamaton tries to knock my cap off he’ll feel the wrath of my cane.
It’s the Agency’s mission to scoop up all comms and bring them back here and then separate the wheat from the chaff. Those who assume that we do collect comms between US persons, must also assume that operators are scribing your conversations. The enormity of that task would be mind-boggling. I’ve been retired since 1997, and even then the software for winnowing the take was very discriminating, and I can only imagine that it’s been tweaked so that only the wheat gets through. Personally, I sleep quite well (even though I’m currently hospitalized).
what’s this on Drudge about an allegation that IRS took 80 million medical records???
This is all so bizzare.