... when those five year-old notions of how the government could use embedded spyware to track Americans...
..turn out to be too true...
"It seems clear that there's something involved here that goes far beyond ordinary wiretaps, regardless of the technology used. Perhaps some kind of massive data mining, which makes it impossible to get individual warrants? Stay tuned."
This fits with Rockefeller's hand-written letter, comparing Cheney's new adventures to the discredited and subsequently abandoned TIA data mining and surveillance project.
Those projects all have error rates which overwhelm any value. Even if they were legal.
This pattern power abuse is a sign not only of an imperial administration;
The overreaching began with the administration's refusal to hold hearings, as called for by the Geneva Conventions, to determine whether captured fighters deserved prisoner-of-war status and with its decision to set aside Army procedures for handling prisoners under those conventions. It extended to the president's assertion that he could designate any American an enemy combatant and lock him up for as long as he chose, without access to counsel or the courts. It includes his claimed right to kidnap people, even inside allied democracies, to transport them anywhere and to hold them as "ghost prisoners," again indefinitely, without allowing the International Committee of the Red Cross any access. Perhaps most shamefully, Mr. Bush has insisted on his right to inflict on detainees treatment that most people would regard as torture. Now added to the list is eavesdropping on U.S. citizens without a warrant. And there is probably more that we don't yet know.
.... but also of an ignorant and incompetent executive, taking whatever he's told might work on faith in part because he never learned to think or lead critically...
Don't know about you, but I draw a very bright line -- Presidents do not willfully and repeatedly break the law, and America does not spy on its citizens.
Oh, and early returns suggest Bush' Iraq adventure is ushering in Iran's twin...
Early voting results announced by Iraqi electoral officials on Monday, with nearly two-thirds of the ballots counted, indicated that religious groups, particularly the main Shiite coalition, had taken a commanding lead. The secular coalition led by Ayad Allawi, the former prime minister, had won only meager support in crucial provinces where it had expected to do well, including Baghdad.
The front-runner among Sunni Arab voters was a religious coalition whose leaders have advocated resistance to the American military and have demanded that President Bush set a timetable for withdrawing the American military from Iraq.
