How to use Eschelon to spy on your Political Enemies...

In this excellent thread, patcox2 lays out the case that Bush's NSA spying is really an Eschelon fishing expedition.

Now, the naysayers are saying that NSA bureaucrats would NEVER spy on Bush's political enemies for Bush. Well consider:

Eschelon works by monitoring ALL conversations with powerful computers looking for key words. Now suppose Bush decided he was worried about Tony Blair and he wanted to filter for anyone talking about Downing Street.

Hey presto, anyone talking on the phone about the Downing Street Memos is on the 'hit' list. Now, a Bush functionary listens to the whole call and determines that it wasn't a terrorist threat. Great. But now a Bush functionary know the contents of the whole call...

So you see the slippery slope we're on here? :shrug:

QAIDA contacts... not just joe blow who may be talking innocently about some memo thingy. Therefore he is justified. See? Simple as that. Question is, if they are known AlQaida contacts, wtf are they doing out on the street???

it's such a ridiculous fucking premise/assertion that it's laughable.

a hypnotic trance. Pity.

unlike the last time they were asked...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x5644904

"Well, the conversations in question met an OBJECTIVE criteria, and our legal experts told us that, in order to avoid 4th amendment problems, we had to listen to ALL conversation that met the criteria - we couldn't discriminate."