Privacy, AT&T and the NSA

There have been lots of articles recently about whether the Bush Administration has been given access to the whole AT&T system (online and telephone). Here's the latest and it's very ugly. I have refrained from commenting on this. But it infuriates me.

Bush's domestic spying program is illegal despite his Attorney General's contrary assertions and those of his apologists in Congress. (It's also an impeachable offense according to many legal authorities.) Americans should be really irate over this, because it's worthy of Stalinist Russia or other nasty dictatorships.

Would you want the US government monitoring your email, telephone conversations and keeping track of the websites you visited? That's exactly what's going on or what the NSA has the capacity to do:

"It appears the NSA is capable of conducting what amounts to vacuum-cleaner surveillance of all the data crossing the Internet, whether that be people's e-mail, Web surfing or any other data," whistle-blower Mark Klein, who worked for the company for 22 years, said in a statement released by his lawyers.

If people don't get upset about this sort of thing it will not only continue, it will get worse.