It's worse than Watergate.
Yeah, I said it.
First of all, the President should NOT be impeached and the only penalties should be at the voting booth. Simply because it is a continuation, albeit expansion, of the previous Administration and previous Republican policies and no one will call for a criminal prosecution of George W Bush or Dick Cheney. But it is a crime and violation of the Constitution nonetheless. Because the Congress did not give the Executive Branch the authority they assumed to take.
What is it? It is the massive and unparalleled spying program carried on in the name of "national security". That is what they all say. That is what Nixon said during Watergate and the Pentagon Papers investigations. It is the Congress that will determine what is in the national security. They are the voices of the people whether we like it or not. The President is the Commander in Chief. He carries out the orders of the people. He does not get to make his own rules. The fact that 9/11 happened did not give anyone the right to declare martial law or to make their own rules to go around our Constitution. This is not a dictatorship.
Barack Obama should have known he was walking the thin line of constitutionality. The long-time Senators on the Intelligence Committee should have known better. But they chose to keep it all secret from the American people. Not only that, they chose to make suspects of every American and put their names in a huge database to be used at some time in the future.
Richard Nixon spied on some people from the opposing Party. He had to resign. He was a crook. This scandal is worse in every respect. Barack Obama should have thrown the Bush policies in the trash bin but he chose to keep them and expand his own authority over them.
I am hoping the Congress stands up for the American people and puts our country back on the right track. They will vote again to repeal the Patriot Act and to make changes in the present policies. I hope they are successful.
The leaders that got stuck with the "war on terror" excuse to skirt the laws and the Geneva Convention should have to pay the price. But they will not. The people will excuse them for whatever reason.
Few will agree with this position and I understand why. Because the truth is just too much for some to bear. But any way you slice it, this is a scandal.
= new reply since forum marked as read
your reply 
For example?
I know for a fact who has access, and there are two dudes in the company who have access to the LI interfaces if we WERE to get a warrant for content from a judge. You ever log into a switch before?
How much raw bandwidth do you think the NSA has to every carrier to collect EVERYTHING!
To handle all the simultaneous calls on Verizon's network, or Level 3, or AT&T, or Global Crossing, or PacBell, or Paetech they basically have to duplicate at LEAST the oversubscribed portions of each of those networks. We usually try to run between 50-80% peak utilization on any given backbone link (pretty much standard in industry)
Last time I checked we had two 10M circuits into the feds- So those could handle about 200-250 simultaneous calls assuming they are all SIP G.711. A fraction of the 10's - 100's of thousands of simultaneous calls on our network during busy hour.
Anybody around here good at math? 
First of all you need to clarify which technology you are talking about-
Text (SMS), those aren't saved at all. It's like trash data to a wireless carrier or anybody running an IMS platform-
CDR, call detail records, yep, we save those for I think seven years. I use them all the time for troubleshooting as well since we not only save the completed calls (CDR (which are called stop records)) but also the attempt records. These are also obviously needed for billing disputes and we look at traffic patterns for international fraud.
Now if you think ANY carrier in the world is collecting the content (The audio stream/media) of every phone call you done went off the deep end. Fuck, you know what a clusterfuck that would be just to engineer it so you didn't have duplicate call legs being recorded? Not to mention the resources required to process and store all of that call data.
I've been evaluating different performance monitoring tools for a couple of weeks now from different vendors. One vendors largest box can process about 1000 simultaneous calls. You have no idea of the amount of voice traffic in the United States I take it 
100's of billions of MOU (minutes of usage) a month for just Verizon alone. Average hold time probably around 3-4 minutes per call, do the math.
Now, we can talk about data services. Companies get DIA (dedicated internet access) and usually some type of MPLS VPN service. You really think I've got a mirror port for every router interface in the network capturing a companies private data being transmitted within a Hub&Spoke or Full Mess VPN? LOL, that's one way for your customers to leave you 
Yep, I keep forgetting Level3 picked Global Crossing up (a very good buy for them by the way )
Also- FYI, I work for a Tier1 network Provider
These networks are believed to be tier 1 networks, in that they do not have overt settlements with any other network.
Name Headquarters AS number January 2011 degree[2][3] Peering policy
AT&T Inc. USA 7018 2365 AT&T Peering policy
CenturyLink (formerly Qwest and Savvis) USA 209 / 3561 1367 North America; International
Deutsche Telekom AG (now known as International Carrier Sales & Solutions (ICSS))[citation needed] Germany 3320 535 DTAG Peering Details
XO Communications[citation needed] USA 2828 2904 XO Peering Policy (dead link)
Telecom Italia Sparkle (Seabone) Italy 6762 344 Seabone Peering Policy
GTT (formerly Tinet)[citation needed] USA 3257 886 AS3257 Peering Policy
Verizon Business (formerly UUNET) USA 701 1946 Verizon UUNET Peering policy 701, 702, 703
Sprint USA 1239 1183
TeliaSonera International Carrier[citation needed] Sweden - Finland 1299 630 TeliaSonera International Carrier Global Peering Policy
NTT Communications (formerly Verio) Japan 2914 718
Level 3 Communications (formerly Level 3 and Global Crossing) USA 3356 / 3549 / 1 4402 Level 3 Peering Policy
Tata Communications (formerly Teleglobe) India 6453 569 Peering Policy
Zayo Group formerly AboveNet[citation needed] USA 6461 1066 AboveNet Peering Policy
?
some people have nothing better to post here on DU.
Kentuck goes on permanent "hair on fire" ignore.
So tired of this drivel on DU.
for bad behavior.
I see a lot of Clinton in Weiner. 
I admit to being more than a little tired of hearing about a politician's sex life. Unless they're harming children or forcing themselves on adults, (or animals, the right seems overly fond of talking about sex with animals), I don't really care. I hate that people hurt their partners that way but that's still between them.
I can see the potential for a pathological behavior making for trouble while in office. Clinton had a problem. Weiner does too. So how one conducts oneself in their personal life can impact their public life. And result in bad things for the public. Still, I blame people for their own actions. Clinton is to blame for what he did. The right is to blame for what they did. And I honestly don't think Newt gave a flying fuck that Clinton was screwing around - it was just something to attack him with.
Though it is great fun to laugh at the "family values" hypocrites when they get exposed.
I can't say with any certainty that Clinton wouldn't have been impeached had they not had his affairs and such. They would have kept digging, I think. I don't know.
...and we need to understand the distinctions.
With Watergate, you had the President of the United States directly ordering his people to do things they all knew were illegal. They acted for purely political reasons. It was criminality in the White House, people acting like thugs under the direction of the President himself. There weren't that many people directly affected, as in: targeted. But then again, it all had a very chilling effect on the politics of the time, and that affected all of us.
With the NSA surveillance, you have a President who is carrying on the programs of his predecessor, both expanding them and entrenching them. However, and this is a big difference: presumably, he really believes these programs "make us safer". Furthermore, as a Democrat and the first black man to hold the office of President, he can ill afford to look "weak on terror" (one could argue that is a political motivation -- but not in the same way as Nixon's was; it's is just the kind of political calculus that all politicians are familiar with). So it's not the White House acting thuggishly, at least not in any overt sense like Nixon's White House did. But Obama came into office as a Constitutional scholar, so we did have some reason to hope he would rein in the overreach of the previous Administration. No such luck. 
So I don't see this as the same kind of thing. There are different motivations and these are different times. Obama seems a basically decent man, unlike Nixon, who seemed tense and paranoid.
But still, when you get right down to it, what our government has created on our behalf is a massive surveillance apparatus. So ultimately, this may indeed be bigger than Watergate in the sense that what is exposed is more massive than what we saw when the whole Watergate fiasco was uncovered. What is exposed is secret spying on not just American citizens, but really the entire American citizenry, in the name of keeping us safe. It was implemented in secret -- even Congress wasn't fully informed, if we are to believe them. Also the FISA court operates under secret laws, so we have little insight into their operations. And the laws allowing this surveillance have been "interpreted broadly", which is to say, in the most permissive way possible to allow the government to collect as much information as possible, in a way that allows them to detect patterns in how we associated with one another. They say it's only to root out terrorists, but so far, they've used these surveillance powers mostly for drug busts.
Anyway that's my $.02.
