Daily Archives: September 26, 2007

Misadventures in Governmental Misinformation

Just before the Summer recess this past August, Congress was coerced to pass a bill that would expire in six months, giving the Bush Administration unlimited power to order domestic communications companies — your Internet Service Provider (ISP), Telephone company, Skype or any other email provider — based in the U.S. to use electronic surveillance against you without a warrant.

That wasn’t good enough for the Bush Administration. Now the Administration reportedly wants to make that power permanent and is willing to purposely use misleading information and lies to achieve those goals. Illegal, warrantless wiretapping was secretly and illegally authorized by President Bush after the 9/11 attacks.

The Bush Administration and their supporters want to be able to secretly monitor all electronic information at any given moment with no external oversight, only a promise to only use it against the nation’s enemies and to be absolved of any wrongdoing.

Mike McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) testified to Congress and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, citing a situation in Iraq where the intelligence community figured that insurgents who kidnapped American soldiers used a communication technology that was “going over the wire” into the U.S.

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