Tuesday, October 16, 2007

White House forbids telecom companies from telling Congress about surveillance activity

I've been posting about the violations of U.S. law in the name of national security by this administration. Recently, I posted about how our government and the major telecommunications companies collaborated to unlawfully listen in on the phone calls of Americans without a judicial warrant. Yesterday, the White House invoked something called the "state secrets privilege" (basically meaning that due to national security, it's none of our business) to prevent three major companies (AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest) from testifying to Congress about whether they gave U.S. intelligence agencies access to our phone and email records.

There is that, and there is also something else. A former Qwest CEO, Jospeph Nacchio, was convicted of insider trading six months ago. He recently testified that the NSA asked Qwest to allow the NSA to conduct wiretaps, again without a warrant, six months before 9/11.

Between this, the X-ray machine at airports that can see you naked, and everything else, our experiment in democracy is coming to an end. When will we change to the USSA?

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