points of action

If there is any doubt in regards to what the Bush White House and provisions like the Patriot Act & The Privacy Act have opened us up to, this should silence them. After The House committee requested a third party investigation into government data mining and the privacy concerns surrounding them, EFF‘s Cindy Cohn found, among other things “that 788 breaches of federal databases transpired between 2003 and 2006”, that “secret rooms in AT&T facilities where the NSA installed monitoring devices like those created by Narus, which are typically used by repressive foreign governments to spy on dissidents” were used to collect information from citizen’s phone calls, emails and other communications, and “that the FBI paid AT&T, Verizon, and MCI approximately $1.8 million a year to process the data requests”.

Read the whole depressing, scary thing here