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U.S. Government Wiretapping Gets Out of Hand

7:30 am on May 12, 2006 | Category: Law, Regulation, Telecom Services, Telephone

The illegal wiretapping program set up by the U.S. government is much more extensive than originally thought. New details have surfaced showing that the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the telephone records of tens of millions of law abiding Americans.

Far from limited to just terrorists and felons, this massive spying effort is monitoring the day-to-day local and domestic long distance calling activities of homes and businesses throughout the nation, according to a recent report in USA Today. This has been done with the cooperation of three major telephone carriers, in an attempt to identify terrorist calling patterns.

One source described the information collected as “the largest database ever assembled in the world,” saying that the NSA has been trying “to create a database of every call ever made.”

To make matters worse, Americaâ€™s three largest telephone carriers, AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth have all quietly gone along with this effort, in a blatant betrayal of their customersâ€™ trust. A fourth major provider, Qwest, refused to cooperate due to the programâ€™s questionable legality, but was apparently too afraid to spill the beans about what they had been asked to do.

These new developments prove that President Bush was lying through his teeth in December, when he claimed that the call monitoring program involved international calls only, and that “one end of the communication must be outside the United States.”

In his latest statement, Bush claims that the program only includes call monitoring, and that calls within the United States arenâ€™t actually listened to without a court-issued warrant.

â€œWeâ€™re not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans,â€ Bush said in response to media coverage of the issue. â€œOur efforts are focused on links to al-Qaeda and their known affiliates.â€

The president went on to say that the program is only being conducted to identify terrorist calling patterns, and locate possible al-Qaeda-linked organizations within America. How exactly terrorist calling patterns are defined, however, was conveniently left out of the statement. In short, thereâ€™s very little to stop the NSA from listening to whichever calls they want to.

The latest details make it even harder than before to trust the Bush administration (or your telephone provider for that matter) on this issue. After all, details about the wiretapping program were withheld in the past, and what we know now could well just be the tip of the iceberg.

Ultimately, it will be up to U.S. citizens to rally against such blatant abuses of government power, and help in the ongoing quest to make telephone providers pay for betraying customers.

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