Illegal Data Mining by the NSA

The NSA has secretly been collecting billions of phone call records with the aid of Verizon, AT&T and Bell South.

This man has taken advantage of the lives of thousands of people to push a program that is illegal, immoral and goes against centuries of what America has stood for. We are allowing this man to take away rights under the falsehood of protecting us.

If you allow this man to say he has inherent powers as president during this time of war (which is actually an occupation, "authorized use of aggressive force") then there is no limit to what he can do.

H

e is already allowed to hold people without trying them and wiretap your phone without a warrant for making a call outside of the United States and now the NSA has amassed a database unprecedented in size that keeps track of every call you make. What is being done with this information? Who has it? How do we know the people who have it are not corrupted?

Nixon left office because he broke the law. He broke into records unlawfully. Are we going to allow this president to do the same thing just because people don't have to physically open files to get the information they want? They have access to YOUR information.

On top of that, how far has this gone? All of these programs in the NSA are private. The NSA itself was private from the 50's till 1975 when it was forced into regulation under FISA in 1978. We found out Bush ordered the NSA to go behind FISA's back and wiretap U.S. citizens without a warrant last year. Now we find the NSA is dealing in shady business by collecting our phone records. What they have done is obviously questionable because Qwest's lawyers didn't give up their phone records even after being pressured by the treat of losing government contracts. Bechtel protected it's customers records from the 30's onward because there could be heavy fines for giving up phone records without warrant.

I'm repeating the article, just read it.