NSA spying worse than imagined

Remember when the NSA spying story started, the White House tried to maintain that the process had only been used 36 times? Well, that's not quite true....

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain back-door access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

Oh, but it gets worse...

What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.

So, the Bush defense on this, that the FISA court doesn't give them the speed and agility necessary, is somewhat true. If your objective is to analyze every call, email, and internet ping into, out of, and through the US, then, yes, filing all that paperwork could be a little cumbersome.

This is just awful. It's my worst paranoid Big Brother nightmare come true.

Never thought the words to "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" would creep me out so much.