Big Brother Bush Is Watching You

I knew the F.B.I. and local law enforcement were infiltrating anti-war groups and making arrests - for what, I do not know - but I did not know the NSA was in on the deal as well.

President Bush signed a secret order in 2002 authorizing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens and foreign nationals in the United States, despite previous legal prohibitions against such domestic spying, sources with knowledge of the program said last night.

The super-secretive NSA, which has generally been barred from domestic spying except in narrow circumstances involving foreign nationals, has monitored the e-mail, telephone calls and other communications of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of people under the program, the New York Times disclosed last night.

Woohoo freedom!!!! Freedom is on the march!!! ... to the concentration camps. Just in case you think has become legal in our crazy, Orwellian, brave new Bush-world, it is not.

Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies at George Washington University, said the secret order may amount to the president authorizing criminal activity.

The law governing clandestine surveillance in the United States, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, prohibits conducting electronic surveillance not authorized by statute.

Regrettably, as we all know, you need a stained dress in order to conduct impeachment proceedings against a sitting president.

However, here is the other best part of this mindfuck story:

The Times said it held off on publishing its story about the NSA program for a year after administration officials said its disclosure would harm national security.

If anyone still doubts that the press is a willing partner in bed with the government, he needs to stop, now. The NYT has a huge story about a potentially illegal action by the government that could affect every American, and what does it do? It rolls over and plays dead because its master told it to do so. Imagine if Nixon did not have to go to the courts to try to get a gag order on the press from publishing the Pentagon papers. If all he needed to do was to place a call to the major papers' editors and say "This could be bad... boogeymen could walk the earth and we could have man on dog if you publish this. And we will cut off your access." While that last point is not explicitly mentioned in the WaPo's rag on the NYT, it is clearly the real reason that the NYT did not publish the article. They did not want their precious access to be revoked.

This is a fatal problem with the fourth estate. It has reached the point where it is trying to preserve the power it has and fending off anyone who tries to reach out and grab any of it. Instead of flexing its muscles and working, the media has become a gluttonous sloth that is guarding its territory, but is too lazy to move. It is for this reason that the current media output model will fail. Slowly but surely, people will turn away from a business that offers a flawed product. They will instead move toward blogs and other media outlets that are more interested in providing a better end-user product - information in this case - than those who are only interested in serving themselves.

The fact that the NYT - and the WaPo and Bob Woodward are guilty as well - are more concerned with preserving their access than fulfilling their role to disseminate information to the public demonstrates how low the press has sunk. They are not the much vaunted guardians of freedom that they try to make themselves out to be, - judyjudyjudy - only the guardians of their own hoards.

Link.