White House cast a wide net in domestic surveillance

I've been meaning to post this but I keep losing the link. But thanks again to Avedon whom I've stolen from shamelessly today, via Phoenixwoman who caught it on the holiday news dump, here it is again

I already posted on this at Detroit News blog so I'll just give a few of the choice grafs here.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.

A former technology manager at a major telecommunications company said that since the Sept. 11 attacks, the leading companies in the industry have been storing information on calling patterns and giving it to the federal government to aid in tracking possible terrorists.

The communications corps has apparently given them open access to the major switches. No way they didn't end up analyzing the patterns of thousands more Americans than they're admitting to. And yet, mark my words, tomorrow there will be somebody in the comment section in Detroit defending them for doing it because, you know, everything changed after 9/11 and we got to git them terr'ists afore they git us.