Thursday, May 11, 2006

You Better Call Mama

Mother's Day is coming up and if you don't call your mother, the NSA will know.

The agency in charge of a U.S. domestic spying program has been secretly
collecting phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, including calls
made within the United States, USA Today reported on Thursday

So far the database only contains the surface information of the calls. They are not actually listening to calls. But anytime a government starts making a huge database of information on the acitivities of its citizens, I start to get nervous. I'm not the only one.

Among major U.S. telecommunications companies, only Qwest Communications
International Inc. (Q.N: Quote, Profile, Research)
has refused to help the NSA program, the paper said.

Qwest, with 14 million customers in the Western United States, was "uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer
information to the government without warrants,"
USA Today said.

Good for Qwest and good ol' fashioned western independence.

UPDATE: I just read this at Glenn Greenwald's.

Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest's lawyers
asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the
agency refused.

The more I hear about this, the more nervous I get.

UPDATE II: Bush to speak shortly about recently revealed NSA program.

1 comment:

Sara said...

I just hope the "if you're not doing anything wrong this shouldn't bother you" defense isn't the justification they end up trying to use.

And that was basically the reaction when the news came out a few years ago that the airlines had been giving up massive lists of passenger ticketing, itinerary and billing information to Homeland Security.