Spying more prevalent

From Doug Thompson at Capitol Hill Blue:

The newest revelations of even more spying on Americans by the uber-secret National Security Agency (NSA) is just part of a vastly-expanded operation that snoops daily into the lives of virtually every man, woman and child in the United States.

My sources tell me that USA Today's Thursday story revealing the NSA has collected phone call records of nearly all Americans for the past few years is only a fraction of a stepped up effort by the government to monitor, on a daily basis, the lives of ordinary American citizens who have nothing to do with terrorist plots and pose no threat to national security.

"It's data mining at the most extreme levels," says a former NSA operative who quit in disgust over the agency's snooping into the private lives of Americans. "We have no business spying on our own."

"Are you telling me that tens of millions of Americans are involved with Al Qaeda?" Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the Senate Judiciary Committee's ranking minority member, asked from the floor of the U.S. Senate Thursday.

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