Bush Says U.S. Spying Is Not Widespread – New York Times
The article, in USA Today, said that the agency did not listen to the calls, but secretly obtained information on numbers dialed by “tens of millions of Americans” and used it for “data mining” — computer analysis of large amounts of information for clues or patterns to terrorist activity.
Oh! Right! That’s all right then. This is just like an episode in NUMB3RS, isn’t it? This makes me feel much more trustiful about the NSA’s data-mining millions of American citizen’s phone numbers.
So now I suppose the secretive and mysterious mathemeticians at the NSA will go back to illustrating their grand theories of where to find Osama Bin Laden by comparing the ebb and flow of millions of domestic phone calls to a gigantic pinball game, or to a spiderweb where they have to deduce the presence and location of an unknown number of big fat spiders, or something.
Do they illustrate their theoretical presentations with cool graphics, too?
Somehow, I don’t think the people working on this are quite the upstanding defenders of truth, justice and the American way that fictional characters Don and Charlie Epps are. Also, they’re probably not as hot in jeans and an open-neck shirt.
Making a hastily scheduled (emphasis Blogula Rasa’s)appearance in the White House, Mr. Bush did not directly address the collection of phone records, except to say that “new claims” had been raised about surveillance. He said all intelligence work was conducted “within the law” and that domestic conversations were not listened to without a court warrant.
“The privacy of all Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities,” he said. “Our efforts are focused on Al Qaeda and their known associates.”
Osama bin who? Zarqawi/Al Qaeda where?
Meanwhile, Mr. Pretendent, deny everything. Deny that this is not a huge shitstorm. Deny that it is not a threat to anyone’s Constitutional rights to privacy. Deny that you weren’t listening in last week when I was talking to my mom.
She doesn’t like you either, so there.