It doesn’t relate to the NSA (it’s about local police surveillance, not federal surveillance), but I found it very ironic nonetheless.

Police Officers Sue Over Police Surveillance of Their Protests

When even the police are complaining about police surveillance, things have gotten a little out of hand, I believe.

I say this as someone who has experienced a bit of this surveillance. In my case I found it more flattering than terrifying (Who me? They’re interested in little old me? Cool!), but it’s not paranoia to say that this sort of thing can rapidly take turns for the worst. J. Edgar Hoover’s biography, which I read several years ago, still gives me the creeps.

But I agree that there is a certain fig-leaf aspect to the fuss. It ignores the fact that the U.S. intelligence services can (and have, and for quite some time) get around the no-spying-on-Americans rule by simply working with the British intelligence services. There’s a long-standing tacit “gentlemen’s agreement” between those services which works like this: If the US finds something about the Brits that might interest the British services, they share it with them. The British return the favor. Presto! No more problems with not being allowed (legally speaking) to spy on Americans. They’ve ben doing this for years. (Although of late, the volume of tips the American intelligence services would like to receive probably outstrips the volume being produced by the British.)

The larger question is, can we trust this administration to behave responsibly with unchecked and unsupervised activities? And given the history of our secret overseas prisons, videotaped evidence of prisoner abuse in Iraq, and the snowstorm of deception and spin that led up to the Iraq War in the first place, I’m not entirely sure that we can.

Plus C’est la Même Chose

It’s true. I don’t live in the States. But remember that this is the age of information. I’ve got CNN and other news networks. I’ve got the Internet, and I’ve got the newspapers. So I’ve got all this information I need, and then some.

The news you are talking about is all bogus and this person is a heck of a lot more truthfully informed than you are. You need to stop listening to the liberal biased MSM and Democrats that are filling your head with nonsense.

It is pretty funny that this person is much more informed than you are.Until it is determined by any legitimate inquiry or by a court of law to be illegal, the act of warrantless wiretaps authorized by President Bush and conducted by the NSA are perfectly legal.

Speak for yourself, but you don’t live in the US, and I do, so you probably have not as much news on it as we do here.