As noted by Jessalyn Radack's rec'd diary today, Glen Greenwald has a bombshell of a report via The Guardian on the NSA not just targeting the phone calls of suspected Terrorists or those they contact - they are gathering Everything.

The Court Order States that Verizon Will produce Electronic Copies of...



all call detail records or "telephony metadata" created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad and (ii) wholly within the United States including local phone calls.

This Order does not require Verizon to produce telephony metadata for communications wholly originating or terminating outside the U.S. in foreign countries

Y'know what it doesn't include? Phone calls made entirely outside the U.S. which - btw - happens to be where most of the TERRORISTS ARE!Thank God the privacy of all those foreigners is so well protected. We wouldn't want the NSA to have captured the conversation in Russia between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his mother about Jihad.

We'll just have to trust that FSB is gonna give us the heads up on that one. Ok, well maybe the next one.

Now, I understand Sen Lindsey's point, which is that in order to do a phone number match you have to have all the numbers to check against. But instead of providing a list of problem phone numbers to Verizon and getting all of those contacts as Graham suggests the FACT IS that they're providing Every Phone Call to the NSA, and then sifting through them on their own without restrictions or oversight.

And it's not like anything could ever go wrong with that idea.

Remember the Line Dancing at the IRS? Yeah, that's was so scandalous. For Shame. Why couldn't they just do the Hokey Pokey, or maybe something simple like the Time Warp.

It's not like the NSA would ever do anything as inappropriate and abusive as That.

Opps.



Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia. ... "These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones," said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA's Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003. Kinne described the contents of the calls as "personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism."

Lindsey?

But wait, it got worse.



"Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News.

Ok, so sure, this was just embarrassing, harmless, fun at the expense of our soldiers.

Let me remind everyone. Some of those phone calls and emails included ones between General David Petreaus and Paula Broadwell. The CIA knew about this already, then leaked the info the FBI and well... all hell broke lose.

There's even a lawsuit over it.



WASHINGTON -- Jill Kelley, the Tampa, Fla., socialite who triggered the federal investigation that exposed CIA Director David H. Petraeus’ extramarital affair and forced his resignation, is suing the FBI and Pentagon for violating her privacy and turning her into an object of national ridicule. Kelley says U.S. officials obtained unauthorized access to her personal emails after she reported receiving anonymous, threatening messages beginning in June 2012. She also alleges that officials unlawfully disclosed her name to the news media after Petraeus’ affair became public.

Yeah, right, nothing could ever go wrong with giving the NSA all this information. Not a thing.

And it's not like we Democrats have been saying this was a rolling disaster on deck for years - because - well, we have. Because it is. If they actually were narrowing the focus down to the relevant persons and phone numbers, as Sen Lindsay's seems to think, it might have some useful purpose at tracking contacts made by terrorists - but it doesn't.

Vyan

