AT&T. Your World. Delivered. …to the NSA.

The Democratic Congress finally had the gumption to stand up to President Bush on one of his pet projects; reading your emails and listening in on your phone conversations.

Well, a little gumption anyway. The President wanted complete amnesty for telecom companies for illegally delivering your private data to the White House. He’s been ranting about this for weeks; that we’re tying his hands on fighting terrorists if he can’t read your emails. Congress refused to comply with the amnesty, but then gave in somewhat. They are waffling on granting immunity, but will allow innocent people to defend themselves with classified data that the government already illegally collected.

Whoopee! But, I still smell a veto coming.

Does anyone even care about privacy laws anymore? Do you care that, yet once again, the Decider ignores a long-standing law? The privacy laws in the 1930’s were put into place precisely for this reason; to prevent a knee-jerk reaction and excuse by the government to invade your private communications.

And don’t think they just look at call records ‘if one party is outside the United States.’ Without actually listening to the conversation, it’s impossible to determine the origination and termination points based on phone numbers. So you’ve got to scan them all.

It’s a documented fact that the government has installed a server farm with a fiber-optic cable at the large AT&T installation in San Francisco. All calls, emails and text messages going over the Internet can be diverted, and perused later by the NSA.

I’ve no doubt that Dick Cheney is thinking about Rights Boy right now, what to do about his spilling the beans; disclosing national security secrets and all that.

You can read the report on the recent Congressional action at:
http://saveaccess.org/node/1865

As well as the position of Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the few friends you have left on this issue, at:
http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2008/03/11

You can read about the government installation at AT&T at:
http://www.eff.org/cases/hepting

We are all about two steps away from getting water-boarded for keeping a secret.