A 5:00 Horror
: The report on domestic surveillance that the Democrats mandated under FISA [cough] reform, in between bouts of tearing the Fourth Amendment to shreds, was just released. Read AP and despair:
Report: Bush program extended beyond wiretapping
Bush (and now Obama*)'s program of warrantless surveillance was never about "wiretapping" fucking telephones; it was and is about surveilling all Internet data. We called this one back on 12/24/2005, and we were right.
And these guys want to charge for content?
Ah, well. No cloud without, and so forth: Whenever you hear someone use the word "wiretapping" to mean the whole program of warrantless surveillance, you know instantly that they don't know what they're talking about.
NOTE * Given that Obama voted for retroactive immunity for some of the perps with FISA [cough] Reform.
UPDATE Here's the Report as PDF, via TalkLeft.
UPDATE Pravda -- and I know this will surprise you -- shits the bed too:
White House Kept Justice Lawyers in Dark on Warrantless Wiretapping
[pounds head on desk]
TalkLeft makes the same mistake -- but at least they'll correct it.
UPDATE Izvestia:
Report Says Wiretaps Got Too Little Legal Review
James Risen must be rolling in his grave. Oh, wait...
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Well, not exactly
The wiretapping statute covers all sorts of electronic communications, not just telephones. The wiretapping statute had been amended quite some time ago to sweep in all kinds of other means of communications (there's also been a broadening of the whole "pen register" concept, which is mostly a means of recording this stuff even if pen registers themselves are extinct).
The Patriot Act and the reauthorization have greatly expanded the ability of various government entities to spy on citizens with government authorization using tools like the amended wiretapping act and pen registers; however, the problem with the Bush program was the fact that it was outside of the really quite lenient process, possibly because they didn't want to leave a record of who they were spying on, or just because the FISC -- which is usually a rubber-stamp kind of operation -- started turning them down.
I just did a paper on this for one of my library science classes.