We Still Ain't Skeert

From Red Letter Rev:

JEEBUS! Just when we think we've made headway against one sort of illegal domestic spying, we find out that BushCo have been sneaking in another. From TPM:

It is the closest thing I've seen to a complete explanation of the surveillance program the Bush Administration has assembled.

Siobhan Gorman of The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that the National Security Agency has assembled what some intelligence officials admit is a driftnet for domestic and foreign communications.

Here's the way the whole thing works, according to Gorman: into the NSA's massive database goes data collected by the Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Treasury.

This information includes data about email (recipient and sender address, subject, time sent), internet searches (sites visited and searches conducted), phone calls (incoming and outgoing numbers, length of call, location), financial information (wire transfers, credit-card use, information about bank accounts), and information from the DHS about airline passengers.

Then the NSA's software analyzes this data for indications of terrorist activity. When it hits upon a suspicious pattern, the NSA "feeds its findings into the effort the administration calls the Terrorist Surveillance Program and shares some of that information with other U.S. security agencies.”

Basically, no American citizen can fart without Bush and the neoKKKons smelling it. Keep in mind, the flip side of "marketing" data collection is a complete profile on each and every American citizen, law-abiding or not. They know every penny you've got, where you spent your money and on what, who you call, who calls you, how many of those idiotic saccharine "forwards" you've actually forwarded (did you do all 10, or will a house fall on you??) ... in short, every single frickin' intimate detail about your life.

Bush and his neoKKKon buddies are bent and determined not only to break the law, but to give themselves amnesty for doing it (Mr. Rockefeller, you lis'nin'??). Add the American "black site" gulags, extraordinary rendition and torture to this vile stew, and you have the very definition of a fascist, totalitarian state run amok.

1984 is now. We're a terrifyingly long way down the path to utter implosion as a nation. And when it does implode, the neoKKKons will quietly slip offshore with all the cash they've stored in their Cayman Island lockboxes -- where we'll never touch either again.

Every nation that has ever hyper-militarized and regimentalized, then allowed a small wingnut cabal to run amok has imploded miserably: from Rome, to Germany, to the Soviet Union... right down, sadly, to the once-free, once-great America. Our economy is the product of a neoKKKon military/industrial complex that is a ticking time-bomb with but seconds left on the dial.

Meanwhile, the targets of this "driftnet" of spying are Quakers, grannies' knitting circles, peace activists, Democrats, equal rights advocates -- y'know, all the very worst turriss. (SNARK!) It wasn't lost on me that the new crowd-control weapon 60 Minutes showed was demonstrated on "peace activists".

We got the message. We still ain't skeert.