so where was all the outrage when this system first came to light in 1999 under Clinton's watch? when Steve Croft did the 60 minutes piece?
In October 1994, Congress took action to protect public safety and ensure national security by enacting the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (CALEA), Pub. L. No. 103-414, 108 Stat. 4279. The law further defines the existing statutory obligation of telecommunications carriers to assist law enforcement in executing electronic surveillance pursuant to court order or other lawful authorization.
The objective of CALEA implementation is to preserve law enforcement's ability to conduct lawfully-authorized electronic surveillance while preserving public safety, the public's right to privacy, and the telecommunications industry's competitiveness.
On the TIA Project:
Washington's lawmakers ostensibly killed the TIA project in Section 8131 of the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for fiscal 2004. But legislators wrote a classified annex to that document which preserved funding for TIA's component technologies, if they were transferred to other government agencies, say sources who have seen the document, according to reports first published in The National Journal. Congress did stipulate that those technologies should only be used for military or foreign intelligence purposes against non-U.S. citizens. Still, while those component projects' names were changed, their funding remained intact, sometimes under the same contracts.
FISA rules demand that old-fashioned "probable cause" be shown before the FISA court issues warrants for electronic surveillance of a specific individual. Probable cause would be inapplicable if NSA were engaged in the automated analysis and data mining of telephone and e-mail communications in order to target possible terrorism suspects.
More info:
Ars Technica should stick to arguing about whether Macs are better than PCs.
This article is laughably stupid.
Topsail has been outlawed by Congress. And before it was, it involved "electronic surveillence" of non-US citizens.
Electronic surveillence means monitoring the content of electronic communications.
The latest revelations (actually, the recycling of five month old news) has nothing to do with "electronic surveillence."
The author simply betrays his utter ignorance of the subject and his paranoid fantasies.
Have another toke, brother!
"USA Today notes that the telcos are only providing phone numbers and transactional data to the NSA, and not personally identifying information on the callers themselves."
The phrase "transactional data" does not appear once in the USA Today story.
And for good reason. It is not involved.
"Customers' names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA's domestic program, the sources said."
It would be pretty hard to compile "transactional data" without any of that.
Again, this "author" is an uninformed crank.