Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

AT&T: “Your world. Delivered. To the NSA”
Boy, if I were an AT&T customer I sure wouldn’t be after reading this spooky story from the NY Times about the company’s cooperation with the NSA in intercepting customers communications and passing it along to the feds:
Mark Klein was a veteran AT&T technician in 2002 when he began [...]

The NY Times reports that Heather Wilson (R, NM), chair of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Technical and Tactical Intelligence (and with direct oversight of the NSA), called for full congressional hearings regarding the NSA spying program:
Heather Wilson, Republican breaks rank with Bush on NSA (photo: Ben Chrisman/AP)
A House Republican whose subcommittee oversees the [...]

USA Today reports that at least three U.S. telecoms are cooperating with the NSA spying program:
(cartoon: Nick Anderson)
The National Security Agency has secured the cooperation of large telecommunications companies, including AT&T, MCI and Sprint, in its efforts to eavesdrop without warrants on international calls by suspected terrorists, according to seven telecommunications executives.
The executives asked to [...]

The ACLU ran a hard-hitting ad in the New York Times on December 22nd which noted the similarities between Nixon’s illegal wiretaps against alleged domestic “terrorists” and Bush’s warrantless NSA snooping against U.S. citizen he deems “terrorists.” The group calls for Attorney General Gonzales to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate these charges. [...]

Martin Garbus has been covering the legal/constitutional angle of the NSA scandal for Huffington Post. While he is a well-known First Amendment attorney, he is not the most elegant or thorough writer in the world (one wishes the HP staff would edit him a bit). But so far there are not many constitutional [...]

I wonder if one year ago (or however long ago the NY Times agreed to a request from the Bush Administration to mothball the Lichtblau-Risen story about NSA spying) Eric Lichtblau could’ve pictured himself one day well on the way to earning his first Pulitzer Prize. In fact, if I were on the Pulitzer [...]

Salon profiles James Bamford, a former Navy intelligence analyst and author of the first, and definitive book about the NSA from the inside out: The Puzzle Palace. Bamford is to the agency what Bob Woodward is to the presidency: a confidant, a chronicler and even perhaps a promoter at times. But Bamford is [...]

The NSA spy scandal just seems to get bigger and messier with each passing day. Thanks to Slate for pointing me to today’s [Los Angeles Times->http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-spy25dec25,0,1480152,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines], which suggests the likelihood that NSA spy satellites are pointed at the United States allowing NSA to intercept virtually all domestic telecommunications traffic. While the story’s authors [...]

The revelations from James Risen’s and Eric Lichtblau’s NSA expose in the NY Times keep coming. And the Times is parcelling them out in serial fashion just like Dickens used to release chapters of his novels in monthly magazine installments. In today’s story, the NSA is revealed to have monitored broad swaths of [...]

While news of Pres. Bush’s executive order allowing warrantless snooping (I read one wag yesterday who called it “Snoopgate”) on U.S. citizens has shocked many of us, one fact hasn’t been much remarked upon: the anonymous sources who blew the whistle in the New York Times article were Bush Administration officials and possibly currently serving [...]