abcnews.go.com — Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia.
Oct 9, 2008 View in Crawl 4
sheetrockOct 9, 2008
There's some consternation in the article about the fact that all the calls were transcribed, not just the ones that seemed pertinent at the time.Well, that's a big difference between a conventional wiretap and a dragnet. The nice thing about the latter is that, if they've got piles of transcripts on a computer somewhere, they can search them and maybe spot important connections between individuals that they wouldn't notice otherwise. Or go back through everything after an event to see if there is added relevance to any of the communication.In a war zone, it makes sense to monitor everything they can get their hands on -- especially now with the assistance of computers to sort and filter. But I'm amazed at the number of people who have no problem with the concept of bringing this technology home into our everyday lives. Even if you're a bland and uninteresting person, with similarly bland and uninteresting phone conversations... who's to say whether ten or twenty years from now those same conversations of yours become incriminating through a radically different political lens?
chadpyleOct 10, 2008
Bush is the real terrorist.
matricul8trOct 14, 2008
When Little George is relegated to the trash heap of history, he needs his civil rights violated repeatedly and often.How's that for free speach?
petrarch1603Oct 27, 2008
matricula8r: That is odd because he is talking about me and I dont even own a tv. I have been to three continents and a dozen countries, so you shouldn't generalize.