Hope everyone had a good holiday. Mine was crazy--possible post coming...
In the meantime, I've just read a great article from
Bruce Schneier putting President Bush's eavesdropping program into historical context. It discusses Project Shamrock--a project that is basically identical to the president's current program in all aspects except that it was monitoring telegraph communications instead of phone/email/etc.--and the FISA statute restricting such monitoring.
Project Shamrock
Excerpt:
A lot of people are trying to say that it's a different world today, and that eavesdropping on a massive scale is not covered under the FISA statute, because it just wasn't possible or anticipated back then. That's a lie. Project Shamrock began in the 1950s, and ran for about twenty years. It too had a massive program to eavesdrop on all international telegram communications, including communications to and from American citizens. It too was to counter a terrorist threat inside the United States. It too was secret, and illegal. It is exactly, by name, the sort of program that the FISA process was supposed to get under control.
Read it.
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