USA Today NSA Headline - Been Traveling And First Learned Of....

this NSA telephone database on the plane this evening while reading USA Today.

A couple of observations:

Comments made by AT&T and Verizon sounds like they were written by someone in the WH and delivered by Scotty McClellan - 'we do not comment on matters for national security (AT&T) and We do not comment on national security matters (Verizon).

Comments made by BellSouth - BellSouth does not provide any confidential customer information to the NSA or any governmental agency without proper legal authority. Come on - BellSouth cooperated - on what legal authority?

When Quest was being strongarmed by the NSA - the NSA told them they didn't want to go to the FISA court because FISA might not agree with them. What????? The NSA was willing to go to telephone companies and strongarm them - but wouldn't go to the FISA court that was set up for just this purpose - because FISA might not agree with them. I don't get it. They had no problem telling the telephone companies what they wanted to do - but couldn't discuss this with the FISA court. Come onnnn!!!! To me this is treasonous. They exposed their plan outside of the proper channels instead of taking it through the confidential route.

And what's this - the NSA only collected "call-detail records" - the telephone industry's lingo for the 'numbers being dialed'. Phone customer's names, addresses and other personal information are not being collected as part of this program. Again - come onnn? If you have the number being dialed how hard is it to get the rest of the info? Pretty easy I would think. Then I thought - they said it's not being collected as part of this program. I question whether next week we'll see an exclusive article in USA Today about another program in which this data is being collected and compared to this one.

I can't take it anymore. I've had enough. Help!!!! I want to go back to the pre-* days.

There are any number of publicly available databases where they can look up anything they want about that number. This is an incredibly sinister operation.

on a number of occasions. I am happy today that my phone is Quest.

read this.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060511-6813