There's a fascinating lawsuit currently being pushed through the intestines of the justice system surrounding an NSA call harvesting program that I've talked about before. You may remember (if you're among the minority that pays attention to things like this) that most of the major telcos rolled over and gave the administration whatever they wanted except for Qwest, who thought that giving the government free reign over American's call data without any sort of due process was sort of, you know, unAmerican-ish.

So there's now this suit, brought in 2006 against the telcos that cooperated. As part of that, we're now finding somthing very interesting. If you thought that the civil-liberties-stomping excesses of the Bush White House were inspired and/or enabled by 9/11, then it's time to re-synchronize your watches. (Also see this Washington Post article.)



So the NSA was actually pursuing unrestrained surveillance of Americans starting when the Bible Bush was inaugurated with hadn't cooled off yet. Which means all this "post-9/11 changed everything" guff from the administration is a wheelbarrow full of bullshit. They were pursuing their police state from the get-go, from a time period when there's plenty of documentation that al-Qaeda wasn't a big concern of the White House.

Which raises two very interesting points.

First, if not terrorists, who was this program intended to keep tabs on?

And second, selling such extralegal domestic spying as necessary to prevent another 9/11 loses a lot of credibility, since this program demonstrably failed to prevent the actual 9/11.