Prometheus 6

I'm not. In fact, I warned you all.

President Bush has insisted in the past that the government is monitoring only calls that begin or end overseas. But according to USA Today, it has actually been collecting information on purely domestic calls. One source told the paper that the program had produced "the largest database ever assembled in the world."

The government has stressed that it is not listening in on phone calls, only analyzing the data to look for calling patterns. But if all the details of the program are confirmed, the invasion of privacy is substantial. By cross-referencing phone numbers with databases that link numbers to names and addresses, the government could compile dossiers of what people and organizations each American is in contact with.

And it's actually impossible to prevent such correlations. The correlated data never has to be stored as such; it can be pulled together on an ad-hoc basis. I can see the web services now. Hell, I could write them, and I make no claim to systems wizardry.

What we have here is a clandestine surveillance program of enormous size, which is being operated by members of the administration who are subject to no limits or scrutiny beyond what they deem to impose on one another. If the White House had gotten its way, the program would have run secretly until the war on terror ended — that is, forever.

Since the NSA told the Justice Department to sod off and they said, "Okay, sure!"
we may have a KNOWN surveillance program of enormous size, which is being operated by members of the administration who are subject to no limits or scrutiny beyond what they deem to impose on one another. Which is even creepier, if you ask me.