>What the NSA & the Bush Administration 'built'.
"A few weeks ago USA Today reported that the agency was collecting information on millions of private domestic calls. A security consultant working with a major telecommunications carrier told me that his client set up a top-secret high-speed circuit between its main computer complex and Quantico, Virginia, the site of a government-intelligence computer center. This link provided direct access to the carrier’s network core—the critical area of its system, where all its data are stored. “What the companies are doing is worse than turning over records,” the consultant said. “They’re providing total access to all the data.”
The N.S.A. also programmed computers to map the connections between telephone numbers in the United States and suspect numbers abroad, sometimes focussing on a geographic area, rather than on a specific person—for example, a region of Pakistan. Such calls often triggered a process, known as “chaining,” in which subsequent calls to and from the American number were monitored and linked.
A government consultant told me that tens of thousands of Americans had had their calls monitored in one way or the other. “In the old days, you needed probable cause to listen in,” the consultant explained. “But you could not listen in to generate probable cause."
article by Seymour Hersh | New Yorker
thanks Conscientious
~Busy busy. With technology like this the FBI, (local police!) won't need to go to meetings or even photograph members of groups who's programs or policies they find objectionable. Simply get a couple of the active members phone numbers or e-mail addresses and watch the metadata?
>related NSA killed system that sifted phone data legally
by Siobhan Gorman | Baltimore Sun