A Yuletide Apocalypse

A great post on wiretapping via Wirearchy

Via the blog Firedoglake

Little by little, chip by chip by chip, away from what we ought to be.
William Arkin’s Early Warning Blog has a profoundly disturbing post today, regarding the seamless nature of electronic surveillance in today’s intelligence agencies, their capabilities — and the fact that the full price that we may pay for the implementation of these policies is not something that has either been thought through or debated. And that long-term cost is enormous. For all of us.

Despite urban legend that NSA surveillance is a news media crusade because the majority of Americans "approve" government surveillance to protect them from terrorists, a new USA Today/Gallup poll finds that almost two-thirds of Americans are concerned that the monitoring may signal other, not-yet-disclosed efforts to gather information on the general public.
This is the central question: Are all of these NSA ingestion and digestion programs merely more efficient efforts to apprehend criminals and terrorists in the digital age, or are they the building blocks of a new seamless surveillance culture?
The government’s position is that if you are "innocent," you have nothing to hide. It is a new version of ‘you are either with us or against us.’ Massive monitoring is of course meant to find terrorists; I completely believe that this is not some 1960’s enemies list politically motivated effort. But these post 9/11 programs signal a new and different problem.
People of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent and Muslims are potential terrorists, machine selected as "of interest."

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