Carol, my intrepid wife, stenciled the above image on the front of our coffeehouse last week in protest of the Protect America Act of 2007. Of course the more we actually learn about the act the worse it seems. It has now become apparent that expiration date of the act is not the six months, reported in the major media, but eighteen months — allowing Mr. Bush to exert monarchical powers throughout the rest of his term. Susan Landau has pointed out that
To avoid wiretapping every communication, NSA will need to build massive automatic surveillance capabilities into telephone switches. Here things get tricky: Once such infrastructure is in place, others could use it to intercept communications.
She is absolutely correct to suggest that these systems, once in place, are ripe for exploitation by third parties. It should also be noted that to build these systems will take great deal of time and effort, and until they are in place it should be assumed that the NSA is simply capturing all phone data it must on a switch related to an investigation it’s performing. Additionally, once the infrastructure is in place to perform this type of automatic monitoring the chances that it will be misused are great and the chances that it will be dismantled are nil.
