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Report: Bush Surveillance Program Was Massive
Report: Bush Surveillance Program Was Massive
By Pamela Hess, AP | Yahoo! News
The Bush administration built an unprecedented surveillance operation to pull in mountains of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, a team of federal inspectors general reported Friday, questioning the legal basis for the effort but shielding almost all details on grounds they're still too secret to reveal.
The report, compiled by five inspectors general, refers to "unprecedented collection activities" by U.S. intelligence agencies under an executive order signed by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
Just what those activities involved remains classified, but the IGs pointedly say that any continued use of the secret programs must be "carefully monitored."
The report says too few relevant officials knew of the size and depth of the program, let alone signed off on it. They particularly criticize John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general who wrote legal memos undergirding the policy. His boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, was not aware until March 2004 of the exact nature of the intelligence operations beyond wiretapping that he had been approving for the previous two and a half years, the report says. Read more .
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With all this recent talk about just how large the anti-US-citizen spy network really is or was, under Bush Junior, and how much info was collected (and likely stored, for all time) I just want to throw in a nearly forgotten reminder: that Bush Senior clearly wanted to pave that "spy on every man, woman and child" road for those who came after him.
Remember the promises of the 1990s government, when they were pushing hard to have the electronic back-door key -- which they, of course, promised they'd NEVER misuse! -- to any info that one person might want to hide from another?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
I think that it's only fair to look back at the Clipper Chip controversy -- a proud period, where the country then told government, "Hell no, we don't trust government with THAT power!!" -- and ask, "Hmmm ... doesn't that look a lot like they were planning to misuse that power, even then?"
Then, they came and asked the citizens if they could have that level of power. Later, they took it, regardless -- and even now, Congress is claiming "they did not know". Huh? If a house got burgled, and you had a record of people asking for skeleton keys to that house, long before the event was splashed all over the media ... how could it be said there was no warning that illegal access would ever be attempted?
Meanwhile: "Ooops! Sorry, we misplaced 5 million e-mails!?"
What ever happpened to the idea of one law, ruling all?