1115.org

(1)
It has taken me a long time to come to appreciate this. And it’s my own damn fault, my own personal myopia. I had just never looked at it in the right light, the Bush administration’s obsessive, compulsive secrecy about all the probably illegal things they have done in the name of keeping us safe in all kinds of ways. It is really a blessing, an act of kindness and compassion. And part of their diligent effort to keep drug companies from making too much money at our expense.

For example, the NYT insisted on revealing to us over the weekend that this has been going on for several years:

To detect narcotics trafficking, for example, the government has been collecting the phone records of thousands of Americans and others inside the United States who call people in Latin America, according to several government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the program remains classified.

Just ask yourself, what difference would it have made if we had learned this back in 2004?

Or if this had been brought to our attention at the end of 2001?

In a separate N.S.A. project, executives at a Denver phone carrier, Qwest, refused in early 2001 to give the agency access to their most localized communications switches, which primarily carry domestic calls, according to people aware of the request, which has not been previously reported. They say the arrangement could have permitted neighborhood-by-neighborhood surveillance of phone traffic without a court order, which alarmed them.

Would anything have changed at all? Apart from our blood pressure, and the depth of our national depression?

Everything would just have played out a little bit earlier—the ritual denunciations and impassioned fulminations by the usual gang of suspects, the hearings, the stonewalling testimony, the possibly well-meaning attempts to pass legislation designed to bring this surveillance into compliance with the law, the last minute sell out by Harry Reid.

But the surveillance wouldn’t have stopped. The people who authorized the illegal surveillance wouldn’t even have been identified, let alone punished. The unidentified people who authorized this violation of civil liberties, and the telecom companies that cooperated with it, would just have been granted retroactive immunity for this and other unknown illegal acts.

We would just have become more painfully aware of how far we have traveled down the road of turning into our own worst nightmares as a society. And who benefits when we are unable to sleep at night, or our blood pressure goes up, or we sink deeper into depression?

So I reluctantly conclude that it’s the Bush administration that’s looking out for us, while the NYT is just a shameless stooge of the drug companies.

(2)
would they, could they, to your phone?
would they, could they, in your home?
could they do it when it’s bright?
could they do it in the night?
would they do it as a game?
it may not help, may not be right,
would they do it all the same?
would they do it since they might?
you bet your ass, you got that right!