The Anti-Bush Intel Community captured today’s news lead with its latest leak in USA Today. Despite all the traction the story is getting in the Blogosphere, we are clearly really just dealing with a repackaging and reissue (“old wine in new bottes”) of the same old NSA communications data-mining story originally leaked to Eric Lichtblau and James Risen in the New York Times last December.
Today’s leak goes:
The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.
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. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews…
“It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA’s activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders, this person added.
Leslie Cauley, author of the USA Today article, adds (curiously overlooking the fact that she and her employers are also breaking the law, and her name is right there at the top of the article):
The sources would talk only under a guarantee of anonymity because the NSA program is secret.
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So, as you may well imagine, the left is, this morning, again indulging in another of its little psychodramas involving George W. Bush poring over each leftist blogger’s phone bill to see how any times he/she spoke to Aunt Tillie last month.
The Mahablog, which styles itself (tin trumpet call) as “Home blog of the American Resistance,” grabs today’s headlined leak, and runs with it, demanding indignantly:Let’s See the “Libertarian” Righties Defend This One.
Why, sure, always glad to oblige a moonbat.
The United States is at war. Foreign enemies are actively engaged in efforts to carry out attacks on civilian population centers in the United States. Enemy agents are undoubtedly resident in the United States and operating off US soil. Can the president of the United States, in such circumstances, authorize the intelligence services of the United States to intercept and open mail addressed to, or sent by, US residents, including citizens? Of course, he can. As Justice Robert Jackson remarked, “The US Constitution is not a suicide pact.”
The caterwauling of the left over the NSA’s communications data-mining activity is nothing more than narcissistic fantasy. Are there any adults on the left? You people all read like adolescent teenagers. The world revolves around little you.
In reality, no one is actually listening to your phone calls, or reading your phone bills. Some very very large computers are crunching through databases which include your phone records, my phone records, and another few hundred million phone records mechanically and indifferently, searching for various kinds of incriminating clues. If you haven’t been placing a lot of calls to suspicious numbers in Waziristan, if your favorite phone buddy is not on a list of terrorists, there is absolutely nothing to be concerned about.
Speaking frankly, guys, if they haven’t arrested Dana Priest, Lichtblau and Risen, Leslie Cauley, and most of their informants yet, there isn’t a lot of chance that anybody is coming looking for you.
