The usual disclaimer: I posted about this in an open thread last night, and have done a quick search to find a diary on the issue but came up empty handed.

From the AP we get the following headline:

Race profiling eyed for terror probes.

And the first paragraph of the story pretty much says it all:

Senator Russ Feingold: ".. illegal wiretapping program ... that more than 70 member of this body still know virtually nothing about."

Here is what they need to know.  Bush's NSA vacuums up EVERYTHING.  Then we trust them.

They also need to know that EVERYTHING, the entire optic stream of Internet data, if routed outside of US jurisdiction, is no longer subject to the protections of US Law or the Constitution. But, hey, we trust them, right??

Someone is watching you:

As I discussed almost 6 months ago, there's a big potential upside to Mister Bush's new power to spy on Americans.

Do you realize that the possibility now exists to virtually eliminate income tax cheating? Just think: some well-placed government data monitoring, and a few high-profile prosecutions, could literally scare up a big chunk of the $350 billion (2001 figure) that the IRS says Americans bilk it out of every year.

This is huge, folks! For perspective, the entire budget of the Dept. of Homeland Security is only around $50 billion. Why, we could pay for 2 or 3 DHS's and still give the rich another big tax cut if we just cracked down on the chiselers. (And never forget: if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.)

Oh, wait. The rich are the main tax chiselers. And Republicans exist to serve them. Never mind.

For the most part, we have chosen to support a man for President, the most difficult job in the world, with enthusiasm and passion through a very difficult primary campaign.  Senator Obama is a man of exceptional intellect and political instincts.  He put together a team of professionals and a plan to bring down the Clinton machine -- and he won.  His next job is to get elected.  Why would we question his judgement now?

Now, I may be Canadian but if y'all are willing to listen to some advice, I can tell you that you've got a problem with managing public perception when it comes to the FISA thing.

See, you didn't give it a proper name.

Remember the "Paris Hilton Welfare Act"?  Now that was snappy and told the reader everything they wanted to know.  But the one I've seen tossed around here, the "Protect AT&T Act", it just doesn't have that snap.  After all, what's wrong with protecting a good American company?  No, what you need are some better titles, and after the cut, here are some suggestions.

[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]

With an ever-present sense of incredulous disbelief I have watched over the past three weeks as Telecom immunity for FISA lawbreakers has somehow been reborn in the House.  President Bush feloniously chucked the FISA statue down the toilet, telecoms broke four more statutes to heinously take America into the habits of dictatorship, they got caught before the election but were enabled by the New York Times, and ever since Congress has beat back attempts to change the law and let the telecoms off the hook.

While we're all distracted by the Clinton-McCain tag team on Obama and therefore on Democratic chances in November, the Bush Administration is quietly attempting to strangle privacy rights and move one step closer to the inescapable Big Brother society.  Not content with torturing whomever they want to obtain usually inaccurate information (including by crushing the testicles of children) and listening in on any phone call or email they please without even a warrant from a rubberstamp court, they are now attempting to requisition military satellites for use on domestic targets in potential violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.

Yes, a person has been caught in what appear to be an attempt to set off a weapon of mass destruction in Washington DC.

Quick action by law enforcement prevented this.

A sample of 20 major U.S. newspapers show when thrown a bone, they choose to nap, remain in a coma, or are conditioned to give the government, which feeds their media empires, a pass.

If journalists did their jobs better, we would get to the heart of the story and not get confused by all the smokescreens and information-as-truth peddled 24/7 to a gullible and exhausted public.

WagTheNews examines 14 storylines and shows how the mainstream media never left its comfort zone to challenge what it was fed.  

Very quick diary, but the lies and distortions about the supposed Hillary and McCain spying need to get called out in a big way.

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/...

This frontpage story on dailykos is a lie.

Clinton's Passport File Also Breached

http://www.dailykos.com/...

Hillary's file was never breached. A trainee simply typed her name into the system but never accessed the file.

Three unauthorized security breaches, in January, February and March, and no one from the State Department contacted Barack's campaign OR his Secret Service Detail. (This is my first EVER diary. Please be gentle and don't attack me for format mistakes, Do please correct me however, if warranted.)

(New per AP : HRC too!!!)

Certain things happening to Sen. Obama are beginning to seem like what happened with MLK.

Well...do they?

Not if you read this little blurb from Time Magazine, which is, I suggest, carrying water for Big Brother himself.

Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador:

The Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) [...] has in recent months again received threatening communications from the U.S. Department of Justice. Citing the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, a letter sent to CISPES in January questions the organization’s relationship with the leftist Salvadoran political party known as the Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation, or FMLN. [...] The letter cites the organization’s website and an article published in the Washington Post – which does not mention CISPES – following the December 2007 visit of the FMLN’s presidential candidate Mauricio Funes. It states that, "it has come to our attention... that the FMLN, and/or possibly its candidate for El Salvador’s 2009 presidential election, Mauricio Funes, hired your organization for the purposes of conducting a public relations media campaign to include political fundraising..." The Department of Justice gave no other evidence to back up the claim.

What do we know of the so-called Total Information Awareness program, so flatteringly described in today's Wall Street Journal?

Though it is much in the news of late, what we read and hear generates much noise, but sheds little light. We glean that it is so secret and vital to our minute-to-minute survival that everyone with knowledge of its details has already been killed. We know it gives Dick Cheney a woody. (Can that be good?) We know that it is favored by the clear-eyed and crew cut patriots at Denny's restaurants across the country, for unlike those effete eastern homosexuals and dope smokers, they have nothing to hide. And we know that the democrats, in a display of the infinite cowardice for which they are justly renowned, have just pumped it full of amphetamines, soaked it in gasoline, and given it the keys to the hummer, much liked a stunned football player staggering triumphantly towards his own end zone, elated by the roar of the crowd, unable to hear the words they scream:

"You're running the wrong way!"

With recent disclosures of how extensive and wanton is the federal government's illegal spying on virtually everything we do that uses an electronic device, I thought now would be a good time to offer a primer on how you can reclaim at least a portion of your 4th and 5th Amendment rights and your absolute privacy.  This diary provides information on how to obtain truly anonymous email accounts and, furthermore, how you can keep that anonymity and protect your privacy from the illegal prying eyes of Big Brother (be he the federal government or corporate Little Big Brothers).

Though primarily focused on email, the information/tools I discuss below can also be used to gain anonymity in IRC chats and even suggests a means of obtaining privacy, though not anonymity, with VOIP softphones on your computer.

The title is derived from an apocryphal saying that has many variations: "The Air Force builds weapons; the Navy builds targets".  That's a restatement of a dilemma which has confronted military strategists since Sun Tzu, and probably before: will something built for offense be turned into a defensive liability by the adversary?

We're now witnessing the latest incarnation of this problem: the feds are busy trying to build massive data acquisition and analysis mechanisms, putatively in order to defend the country.  There are Cyber Strike Command this and Anti-Terror Task Force that and all of them are getting their hands on email, voice, fax and other communications data -- with, as we now know, the illegal assistance of the telecom industry.

But put aside for a moment the whole FISA debacle and turn your attention, if you will, to another question: even if we optimistically presume that they have the very best of intentions and the highest standards of integrity, are they building a weapon or a target?

The answer, sadly, very much appears to be the latter.  Which means that not only are American taxpayers funding the chilling invasion of privacy that all this represents, they're funding it for other governments.