Posted on 05/11/2006 10:40:07 AM PDT by West Coast Conservative
The USA Today "scoop" on the NSA's massive telephone surveillance program isn't really news at all - though liberal media outlets have been blaring the story as a shocking revelation all Thursday morning.
The Agency, the paper announced ominously, "has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans . . . The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren't suspected of any crime."
But as NewsMax noted in December - back when the New York Times tried to ballyhoo a similar story about the NSA's terrorist surveillance program - CBS's "60 Minutes" blew the lid off the agency's domestic wiretapping in Feb. 2000, when the Clinton administration was using it for all sorts of unauthorized purposes.
"60 Minutes" host Steve Kroft introduced the segment by saying:
"If you made a phone call today or sent an e-mail to a friend, there's a good chance what you said or wrote was captured and screened by the country's largest intelligence agency. The top-secret Global Surveillance Network is called Echelon, and it's run by the National Security Agency."
NSA computers, said Kroft, "capture virtually every electronic conversation around the world." Echelon expert Mike Frost, who spent 20 years as a spy for the Canadian equivalent of the National Security Agency, told "60 Minutes" that the agency was monitoring "everything from data transfers to cell phones to portable phones to baby monitors to ATMs."
Mr. Frost detailed activities at one unidentified NSA installation, telling "60 Minutes" that agency operators "can listen in to just about anything" - while Echelon computers screen phone calls for key words that might indicate a terrorist threat.
Now, more than six years later, the big media is pretending that this is all brand new - something cooked up by President Bush in a mad rush to shred the Constitutional rights of every American.
But even USA Today had to admit in its own report that the NSA wiretapping program has "been done before, though never on this large a scale."
Excellent post and I agree with every word you wrote. Thanks for the ping, Txsleuth.
Excellent reporting freepers
damn fine post
You got that right
/s
Echelon has nothing to do with the latest NSA story, which is about the illegal giveaway of call records, not about wiretaps or interception of communication content. Stupid article.
Boy, it's about time SOMEBODY told it like it could be.
Whenever people complain about this sort of thing, I always give them three names to consider:
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
President Hillary Clinton
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.