Following a pointer from Joe over at AmericaBlog, we have the admission that the Bush administration "accidentally" eavesdropped on purely domestic calls -- a real no-no:
A surveillance program approved by President Bush to conduct eavesdropping without warrants has captured what are purely domestic communications in some cases, despite a requirement by the White House that one end of the intercepted conversations take place on foreign soil, officials say.
The officials say the National Security Agency's interception of a small number of communications between people within the United States was apparently accidental, and was caused by technical glitches at the National Security Agency in determining whether a communication was in fact "international."
Now, one has to ask, given the alleged technological wizardry over at the NSA, how does one not know that both ends of a communication are within the United States?
I mean, us regular Joes the world over have access to caller ID, call display, and so on. We have phones that will transmit pictures, we have handheld devices with built-in GPS that will tell us where we are. And yet we're supposed to believe that the NSA can't figure out if a transmission is domestic or not:
"Hey, Sam, I got something interesting here. And the caller's in Lebanon. Or maybe Cleveland. Hard to tell."
And the lies just keep coming, don't they?
No comments:
Post a Comment