The letter from two Democratic Senators warning the American people of the misuse of the Patriot Act should be read in the context of the big new NSA data collection center being built in Utah.
A link to that article was posted here previously. Here is a small clip.
A reread of the entire article will give some emphasis and context to the letter from Wyden and Udall.
While it is tempting to view the overreach by the administration as just another malfeasance by Obama, keep in mind that this center will begin operation during the presidential term beginning in January 2013. Misuse of government power is not the sole province of Democratic administrations, as President Nixon's term in office made rather clear.
Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.
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wired.com |
