Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Gosh darn that new-fangled technology.


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?

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