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There's a Congressional whitepaper that gets put out every year or so on assessment of China as a rival/potential threat. This is a link to the 2005 version that Google found:

http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/china.html

So yes, China is actively seeking U.S. military secrets. It's official policy. I've read in past versions before 2000 that Chinese govt. policy was also to employ all the means to deter U.S. intervention in armed conflict with Taiwan, among which was to use anti-satellite missiles to neutralize U.S. surveillance capabilities, cyberwarfare to bog down the U.S. military and country in general, and also to use economic warfare to make the United States too frightened of losing its standard of living to bother about a small island in the South China Sea.

Given China's recent successful test of Anti-Satellite weapons and forays into cyberwarfare, the level of U.S. debt China holds, and the Bush administration's willingness to sell it to them, is particularly alarming.

Interestingly enough, many of the U.S. military secrets they acquire they get via Israel, our good friends, who steal them from us at will and get a free pass from the U.S. Congress because they're our good friends. (NPR story on the leaders of AIPAC, spying on the U.S. and passing secrets to Israel: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4802479)

Yes, this submission to Slashdot refers to space shuttle technology. Maybe that technology is valuable, maybe it isn't. But if we don't shut this activity down, it will bite us in the ass more than it already has.

For instance, Clinton authorized the sale of sensitive satellite technology back in the late 90's that allowed the Chinese to significantly upgrade their long-range targeting capability. Now, the Chinese don't have that many long-range missiles, so being able to target more effectively works wonders for their nuclear capability.

Not more than a few months after the Chinese got the tech from Clinton, India, which has fought border wars with China and lost ( http://www.fas.org/irp/world/india/threat/china.htm ), suddenly declared itself a nuclear power. Pakistan, of course was right on their heels, being eager to let India know they can play too.

So Chinese espionage, and foolish U.S. administration policy, has already directly caused a nuclear standoff in South Asia and given the Chinese the ability to reach and hit cities on the western U.S. mainland.

I'm not sure that you're 100% right in your criticism.

One of the favorite forgottens of the '90s conflict and its aftermath with Iraq:

While on patrol, a group of soldiers literally stumbled over a large circle of pipe out in the desert attached to an innocuous facility. Being a news junkie - and working in a related field at the time - this one hit me like a ton of bricks. It was broadcast late night, but because Joe Reported never really got it, or so I speculate, it was one of those not-often repeated stories (again, anomalous) but its implication did become part of "what everyone knew."

http://www.iraqwatch.org/perspectives/bas-iraq-hide-seek-9-91.htm
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/iraq/nuke/program.htm
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13117790.400-iraq-clings-to-its-nuclear-secrets-.html

If the question is why were so many willing to believe in WMDs in the first place, this time around, there it is. That we did so is shameful, but it wasn't without cause.

To have been lied to by our leaders is beyond infuriating. But we've also been played by them in another way. What didn't come out in popular media until much later - that I, a news junkie, am aware of - is Saddam stupidly bluffing and intimating that he did or could possess such capability in his responses to the West. He just didn't believe that Dubya would do anything about it.

I guess my point is to emphasize that we weren't just lied to, and we weren't just sheep to believe the lies. We were misled by guys who later decided to take the heat as liars instead of guys who were too stupid to recognize bluff from data. I guess I'd damned well be neither, but if I had to admit to the American public that a) I'm a lying politician or b) I'm a politician dumber than Saddam, - well, let's just say I can maybe see how the choice was made.

So, we weren't just sheep believing lies. We were sheep to believe the under-qualified. I'm guilty of not buying it until Colin Powell supported the position. Prior to that for me, it was easy: claims by idiots in government. So I bleated along complacently because I thought Powell's judgement would be different - trustworthy. I forgot - as did anyone like me - this simple adage: Tell me who your friends are, I'll tell you who you are. I should have known if one would get pulled up or one would get pulled down if you put Cheney and Powell alone in a room together.

As far as your personal paranoid fantasy - take heart. You nailed it in one. For a bunch of fancy words outlining this, see an earlier post of mine in this topic, if you care. Not claiming to have proved anything, but I did use a lot of correctly spelled words - your view is neither uniquely yours nor fantasy - paranoid or any other kind, IMO.

2. General Findings.

We found that key FBI personnel involved in the FISA process were not properly trained to carry out their important duties. In addition, we found that the structural, management, and resource problems plaguing the FBI in general contributed to the intelligence failures prior to the 9/11 attacks.18 Following are some of the most salient facts supporting these conclusions.

First, key FBI personnel responsible for protecting our country against terrorism did not understand the law... ...So deficient was the FISA process that, according to at least one FBI supervisor, not only were new applications not acted upon in a timely manner, but the surveillance of existing targets of interest was often terminated, not because the facts no longer warranted surveillance, but because the application for extending FISA surveillance could not be completed in a timely manner. Thus, targets that represented a sufficient threat to national security that the Department had sought, and a FISA Court judge had approved, a FISA warrant were allowed to break free of surveillance for no reason other than the FBI and DOJ's failure to complete and submit the proper paper work. This failure is inexcusable. ...An FBI document obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, which is attached to this report as Exhibit D, suggests that the errors committed were far broader. The document is a memorandum dated April 21, 2000, from the FBI's Counterterrorism Division, that details a series of inaccuracies and errors in handling FISA applications and wiretaps that have nothing whatsoever to do with the "wall." Such mistakes included videotaping a meeting when videotaping was not allowed under the relevant FISA Court order, continuing to intercept a person's email after there was no authorization to do so, and continuing a wiretap on a cell phone even after the phone number had changed to a new subscriber who spoke a different language from the target.

MOD PARENT UP

I had the same reaction as you when I heard this story on NPR a week or two ago. Why would anyone in this day and age carry sensitive information on a laptop across an international border? I'd make sure I had nothing important on my laptop at the border, then download the sensitive information when I've reached my destination, and upload anything I needed before departure. I know that heavy-duty forensic analysis could probably resuscitate anything I put on the hard drive, but that's not what we're talking about here.

Isn't this one of the ways we've always thought that the Internet would destroy geographic borders in the long run?

Moreover, you could always pull the hard drive, ship it by FedEx or some other carrier, and replace it with a clean "dummy" drive before crossing the border. Seems to me that whatever efforts the Customs and Immigration people adopt could easily be foiled by someone with malicious intent while annoying the hell out of ordinary businesspeople and tourists.

Just what information are they expecting to find on random laptops anyway? Plans to build a nuclear device that I can get from the Internet like this?

The Dept. of Commerce defines it as a machine with a composite theoretical performance equal to or exceeding 1,500 million theoretical operations per second.
I, for one, find this definition highly stupid and refuse to call a machine capable of less than two orders of magnitude more FLOPS than "enthusiast"-grade hardware of the respective timeframe a supercomputer.
Even though your PSP may outperform them, "the room-filling monstrosities from the 50s" remain supercomputers to me while a '08 supercomputer would need to outperform at least 100 Dual Core 2 Quad systems.

Someone tried to explain this to the general public waay back in 1990.
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/navy/docs/np13/np13appc.htm

Interesting to say that lots of US satellites are nuclear powered. According to this article Defense has given up wanting to use them, and the previous rule was that you needed the permission of the president.

Your points are well taken, but I certainly wouldn't characterize fas.org (the official site of the Federation of American Scientists") as a "military conspiracy fansite" though I do admit that I've thought for years that chunks of the site have had a bit of a dated/amateruish look to them (to say the least).

Comparative Characteristics of Imagery Satellites

Example: The Lacrosse satellite (KH-12 is the other designation) weighs 14-16 tons.

"Lacrosse and Onyx are the code names for the United States' National Reconnaissance Office terrestrial radar imaging reconnaissance satellite. While not officially confirmed by the NRO or anybody in the U.S. government, there is widespread evidence to confirm its existence."

"Due to overruns, the cost of the Lacrosse-1 radar reconnaissance satellite launched in 1988 from the Space Shuttle exceeded $1 billion. In the opinion of experts, it was designed, above all, to search for mobile launchers for Soviet ICBM's and track strategic weapon systems beyond staging bases. The radar images were transmitted to the processing center via TDRS repeaters located under the management of NASA and deployed in a geostationary orbit. The Lacrosse-2 was launched in 1991 using a Titan-4 booster rocket from the Western Missile Test Range, which made it possible to increase the orbit inclination and, consequently, the zone of coverage from 57 to 68 degrees."

SoSCOE will probably be what brings FCS down. (Locally, whenever someone complains about something not working in it, the reaction is generally "what's new?") Along with the sheer number of different companies working on the thing trying to keep things away from each other because they're competitors.

And I, personally, feel like FCS would replace this, not Blue Force. But more likely, features that were supposed to go into FCS will get sucked into AFATDS instead.

Google for donut on rope sometime :)

Was able to find this. It's a little old, written in May 1995. And the numbers that the author uses were fairly old even then: 1978 through 1986. Haven't been able to find anything more recent.

Although, the author disagrees with these estimates.

I don't really agree with the author's logic here though. To arrive at this 1:10 (10%) return, he cites a study in which it was found that the $54B to $55B spent on NASA contributed to $21B in "sales and savings benefits", but only $5B of the $21B would have been impossible without NASA's contributions. NASA only partially contributed to the remaining $16B. To get this 10% return, he drops the entire $16B. However, I think $16B * (the percentage that NASA technology contributed) should have been included. Even if NASA technology only contributed 50% to that $16B, this would be about a 25% return altogether, which is better than the 20% "typical rate of return currently required on commercial investments".

*cough*JDAM*cough*Tomahawk*cough*F-16*cough* Sorry got something stupid stuck in my throat.

From the looks of it, that "something stupid" has migrated upwards a little.

Exactly as the parent poster said, weapons like the Tomahawk have multiple guidance systems of which GPS represents only one. In this case:

Guidance System: Inertial and TERCOM [terrain contour matching]

That same website has stats for JDAMs ("an inertial navigation system/global positioning system guidance kit") and F-16s ("AN/APG-66 pulsed-Doppler radar"). Little or nothing seems to be GPS-only.

These days, the UK only keeps *one* nuclear-missile submarine at sea at any time. There are only four such subs in the fleet, and normal practice is that one is at sea as the nuclear deterrent, one is laid up for maintenance, and the other two are in port or on exercises. http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/uk/doctrine/sdr06/FactSheet4.pdf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Trident_system

"So if we legitimately have to shoot down an hijacked airliner as we should have in September 2001, we won't be able to shoot an AIM-9 at it, we'll have to get close enough in order to shoot it down with the fighter's gun?"

AMRAAMs aren't IR and have longer range tham AIM-9s.
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/missile/aim-120.htm

If the AMRAAMs for some SMS reason wouldn't fire, attacking aircraft could also shoot 9s from above.

A polite euphemism for this:

http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/smart/agm-65.htm

Scroll down to see the movie.

Ok, I agree this is a fuzzy area. http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/94-166.pdf

At the heart of these cases is the notion that due process expects that a defendant's conduct must have some past,
present, or anticipated locus or impact within the United States before he can fairly be held criminal liable for it in an American court. The commentators have greeted this analysis with hesitancy at best,25 and other courts have simply rejected it.26

But it goes on...

Conceding this outer boundary, however, the courts fairly uniformly have held
that questions of extraterritoriality are almost exclusively within the discretion of
Congress; a determination to grant a statutory provision extraterritorial application
- regardless of its policy consequences - introduces no new constitutional infirmities.

So in the end you are right. You are at the whim of getting arrested, at least in America... In other countries well the situation is not so clear. I guess you hit upon a "gray spot" in the law...

And they used Hellfire http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/missile/agm-114.htm and Brimstone http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/1999/news_release_990823n.htm missiles to destroy those people.

The nuclear plant in a sub takes up something like 1/3 of the internal volume. this page quotes the size and weight of the plant in a Los Angeles-class sub as 1600 tons, with a volume of 42 (length) x 33 (diameter) feet. Its heat output is ~160 MW, part of which is used to drive a 35000 shp turbine.
Now, the reactor itself is just a fraction of this volume. The data are classified, but as a comparison the reactor in Dodewaard (an experimental nuclear plant in the Netherlands, decommissioned a few years ago, power output 60 MWe) was about 2x1 m. The rest of the space is taken up by the cooling circuits, turbines etc.

A naval plant also uses highly enriched fuel so the reactor can be smaller than commercial ones.

I wouldn't consider these to be 'very small'.

[N]o action shall lie or be maintained in any court, and no penalty, sanction, or other form of remedy or relief shall be imposed by any court or any other body, against any person for the alleged provision to an element of the intelligence community of any information (including records or other information pertaining to a customer), facilities, or any other form of assistance, during the period of time beginning on September 11, 2001, and ending on the date that is the effective date of this Act, in connection with any alleged classified communications intelligence activity that the Attorney General or a designee of the Attorney General certifies, in a manner consistent with the protection of State secrets, is, was, would be, or would have been intended to protect the United States from a terrorist attack.

the fastest fighter planes barely crack Mach 1.6.

the fastest fighter planes barely crack Mach 1.6.

the fastest fighter planes barely crack Mach 1.6.

the fastest fighter planes barely crack Mach 1.6.

The AC-130U Spectre (code-named "Spooky") has been a very accurate weapon of war. It flies really slowly, which increases its accuracy when firing on ground targets. It can loiter over its target for hours. The latest versions of the aircraft have gyro-stabilized mounts for its weapons, and advanced night optics that can see through smoke grenades. Its radar can track the 40mm and 105mm shells it shoots and feedback the information to the aircraft to adjust the aim of later rounds. The aircraft can accurately attack two targets up to a kilometer away at the same time. Accurately aiming a weapon fired from a AC-130U at a ground target has been a problem that has been adequately addressed for some time already.

http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/ac-130.htm

first, I predict for the foreseeable future none of these fighting machines will be allowed to shoot anyone without human authorization.

There's considerable interest in systems that shoot back, really fast. The U.S. Army has had counter-battery fire systems for decades, but they've been used against larger indirect-fire weapons. The Army would like to downsize this into a "use a gun, die within seconds" capability, something that could detect hostile gunfire and land indirect fire on the shooter faster than a human could get out of the way.

We'll probably see robotic guns like that, operating under rules of engagement that allow them to kill anybody without an IFF firing a weapon.

It's the cancer, blood poisoning, and nervous-system failure resulting from radiation exposure that's deadly. I mean, the only way I can think of offhand to kill someone with radiation is to microwave them.

I was a lot less worried about pals being set to all zeros when I discovered the safe that held the Sealed Authentication System codes had a large hole covered up by a magnetic clip-board. The CMS http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/navy/docs/swos/ops/72-23.html guy somehow hozed the combo and didn't want to report it. Luckly it was only the outer safe that held the SIOP-ESI level material. The release codes where in a safe inside the first one that I had the combo to.

I thought the U.S. missiles in Turkey were removed as part of negotiation that ended the Cuban-Turkish Missile Crisis. I believe that was one of the terms Robert Kennedy worked out with the Soviets: we'll withdraw our missiles from your backyard if you'll withdraw your missiles from our backyard.

Also, rumor has it the Soviet submarine K129 was hijacked by elite troops, and tried to launch a missile at Pearl Harbor. If this happened, and the sub did try to launch a missle, the missile's safety mechanisms caused it to self-destruct, taking the sub down to the bottom of the sea. There's a lot of rumor and conspiracy theory about it, but Project Jennifer seems to have been about recovering the sunken Soviet sub.

Mozambique: http://www.fas.org/irp/world/para/renamo.htm is short and makes interesting reading. There is nothing there about US support, only S African (and originally Rhodesian).

Angola: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/264094.stm is the obituary for the leader of Unita. Nuff said.

To your 'trash the US in 60 minutes', I remember the insanity which was the Reagan foreign policy, and the amazement when Bush ('4 more years') came to power and changed e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. Remember when Iraq attacked Iran and the US joined in on Iraq's side? That turkey came home to roost as well. The US under Reagan supported terrorists while professing to fight terrorism.

If you really want some fun, google 'us support khmer rouge' and look around. Apparently the US encouraged China to support those nice Cambodians during the Carter (!!) and Reagan years (this was after Vietnam got tired of Khmer Rouge activities and invaded). Bush stopped that as well. Some of those sources look rather unreliable.

I know plenty of Viet Nam vets, several Korean War vets, and a few WWII vets. They didn't have anywhere near the trouble as this generation at war. The problem of PTSD has been progressively getting worse with each generation. War is not a pleasant experience under the best of circumstances, but it is possible to make it through alive and mentally okay.

Did you see the report by the Congressional Research Service the other day about how, in certain years, we've lost more soldiers in peacetime than in some of the years in Iraq? http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32492.pdf

1) A substantial amount of military research remains hidden from the public, so dollar for dollar I would hazard that the DoD is the least efficient vehicle for scientific research that benefits the public.

2) As a pure jobs program, the military is remarkably inefficient. If your goal is to keep people gainfully employed, you could probably create ten times as many jobs by just handing out picks, shovels, and an offer to pay $10/hr for anyone who wants to plant trees. Divide the number of dollars spent by the number of people employed. It's abysmal.

3) You don't see any consequences to our behavior? Do you think we'd have invaded Iraq if our military wasn't just sitting there like a big, idle ball peen hammer? The fact that we have it makes it very hard not to use it. It makes it hard not to threaten to use it. It makes it hard not to imply that it might be used if we don't get our way. In short, it makes it very hard to convince any country that we're negotiating as equals.

4) So, the U.S. spends most of its military budget on... building and maintaining the military? Were you expecting there to be a line item for "bribes, kickbacks, and other gratuities" or "chopping limbs off orphans"? I fail to see the "that's not so bad." As to the GDP argument, I found a list, and the countries that devote a bigger chunk of their economy to military spending reads like a who's-who of Places Which I'd Rather Have My Testicles Dynamited Off Than Spend a Week In.

Also, you can't pretend proportionality is a good metric. Two reasons. First, if you assume that some amount of military spending constitutes a necessity, then as the economy gets bigger, then the amount of money spent on necessities should go down.

Of course, military spending is odd, necessity-wise. How much you have to spend depends heavily on how much your enemies are spending. If you're in a standoff with the country across the strait, and they quadruple their spending, then you're compelled to spend a lot more as well.

Which raises the questions: who the hell is forcing us to spend this much? and how much of the rest of the world's spending is driven by the fear of Crazy Uncle Sam deciding to turn its super nifty military's attention towards them?

Look at military spending as percentage of GDP. That's what makes a superpower these days. The US economy is so much larger than most others that a relatively small percentage of GDP adds up to a huge raw number.

Try Truth and Politics for some interesting charts and numbers. Take a look at this PDF from the Library of Congress's Congressional Research Division for comparisons to other countries including charts to rank by total dollars and an alphabetical list.

The US spends far less of the country's total buying power on defense than many other countries, and much of that is spent helping defend allies around the globe. Those allies tend to be happy for the help, although the specific methods employed often come into question.

Secondly, reprocessing. The US's main focus for reprocessing is wrapped up in the Bush Administration's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP). This is a freaking scam, and the National Academy of Sciences backs me up. Basically, the types of reactors envisioned require materials science that just isn't there yet, requires funding that just isn't there yet, and requires an infrastructure that Just Isn't There Yet.

The solution is to turn Yucca Mountain into a medium-term repository. Bury it, safely, for 100 to 200 years, let the exceptionally hot stuff decay away, and I'm pretty darned sure civilization will be able to find some use for the energy stored in there in 100 years. But until then, let the technology mature. The commercial industry (and, by extension, every person in the U.S. who pays for electricity) has been paying into the Yucca fund for too long not to see any return on that investment.

Oh, one more snarky comment. Please provide support via links for your assertions; it's not hard. I would like to see evidence that after 30 years, the spent fuel coming out of a burner like envisioned for GNEP is actually less radioactive than the original ore.

I guess there's a reason you're posting at 0. You can't follow a link to http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fisa/. The federalist papers have nothing to do with what a squad in Iraq can do that is in hot pursuit of terrorists. The FISA, however, does. Now crawl back into the pond from which you slithered out.

Rank armatures, why BS arround with that abomination when you can get the real-deal the MK 15 Phalanx Close-In Weapons System (CIWS)? An anti-aircraft gun shooting solders on the ground WTF, we've had minimum elevation cut-outs for 30 years that I personally know of.

A description of the criteria supposedly used to flag "criminals" in the NCIC is available here. Assuming there are actually adhered to, it would seem doubtful that minor infractions would show up in the database. But criteria (B) is interesting. What constitutes a "serious" offense?

NCIC is a computerized index of criminal justice information (i.e.- criminal record history information, fugitives, stolen properties, missing persons). It is available to Federal, state, and local law enforcement and other criminal justice agencies and is operational 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. ...
C. Missing Persons:
    1. A person of any age who is missing and who is
    under proven physical/mental disability or is senile, thereby
    subjecting that person or others to personal and immediate danger.
    2. A person of any age who is missing under circumstances indicating
    that the disappearance was not voluntary.
    3. A person of any age who is missing under circumstances indicating
    that that person's physical safety may be in danger.
    4. A person of any age who is missing after a catastrophe.
    5. A person who is missing and declared unemancipated as defined by
    the laws of the person's state of residence and does not meet any of
    the entry criteria set forth in 1-4 above.

...if they want to have their names removed from the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database, which appears to be what the Canadian officials pulled. The NCIC "is provided by the FBI, federal, state, local and foreign criminal justice agencies, and authorized courts." Thus, the NCIC is made up of FBI data and data provided to the FBI by other government organizations. To correct a record in this database, "the subject of the requested record shall request the appropriate arresting agency, court, or correctional agency to initiate action necessary to correct any stated inaccuracy in subject's record or provide the information needed to make the record complete." Unfortunately, accessing the record in the first place can be a challenge; it looks like it requires being fingerprinted and making the request through a law enforcement agency that has access to the record. More information is available here.

...if they want to have their names removed from the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database, which appears to be what the Canadian officials pulled. The NCIC "is provided by the FBI, federal, state, local and foreign criminal justice agencies, and authorized courts." Thus, the NCIC is made up of FBI data and data provided to the FBI by other government organizations. To correct a record in this database, "the subject of the requested record shall request the appropriate arresting agency, court, or correctional agency to initiate action necessary to correct any stated inaccuracy in subject's record or provide the information needed to make the record complete." Unfortunately, accessing the record in the first place can be a challenge; it looks like it requires being fingerprinted and making the request through a law enforcement agency that has access to the record. More information is available here.

New York Times article (Original government document) about a proposal to increase the limitation on exports from 195 MTOPS to 1.5 GTOPS. I can't be certain, but since the fastest supercomputer in 1979 (when the original restriction was enacted) was 250 MFLOPS, I would guess that 1 TOP is approximately equivalent to 1 FLOP. While you may be correct that the current definition according to United States export restrictions is 1 TFLOPS, it is pretty clear that the definition has changed over time.

Its more like: SS routinely monitors all comunications. SS owns massive voice matching software. SS is a dodgy name. SS have flagged this post for saying too much. They perfected these methods in the Cold war to use against the Russians, now it's time to implement some Homeland Security, Cold War style.

Is that the implantable microchip page is real (check out, however, the clip art source and date). It is a better article than half of the ones posted. Come on, open up and share more often. A lot of us don't take our meds all of the time. We would understand!

Ok, I was talking about the maximum payload capacity for the launch vehicle: http://www.fas.org/spp/guide/russia/launch/soyuz.htm 7,300kg = about 15,000lb

This entire story is inaccurate. The Oerlikon weapons system they were using is a variant of a towed anti-air gun first made in 1955. This version has a computer-based, laser-guided targeting system. But it was made in 1985.

The United States has been using automated anti-air weapons systems for years as well. The MK15, for example, is the last line of defense for many types of ship in the United States fleet, and it was first introduced in 1978. It is fully automated and computerized and always has been.

There is nothing new about these types of weapons. And yes, they're necessary. The MK15 is designed to shoot down (using a high-speed cannon) high-speed missiles in mid-air a mile or less away from the ship. No human could ever reliably do that.

It may make for a sensational news story about "robots" when a weapon malfunctions, but these weapons have been proven as reliable as any other - and more capable. And hey, guns kill people by mistake plenty of times when they're aimed by humans too.

[...] by building contact lists of who calls who. This is precisely what they want to do in the name of fighting terror, but they get the same lists of people in various political parties, with ties to groups that expose various embarassing things about political leaders, have viewpoints that differ from their own or those in power

They could abuse that, indeed, if they were monitoring the calls within the US — something that is, indeed, illegal, and that is not even being alleged to has happened.

Monitoring calls where only one of the parties is in the US might be illegal too, but is far harder to abuse because most of the political life of USA happens inside the country. I mean, they could have found some calls between Clintons and Chinese Army or Kerry and Chinese Army, but that's about it...

has. And I can guarantee you that an administration that implemented NSA spying - AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION OF THE USA - 7 months BEFORE 9/11 - would be more than happy to misuse that information.

This sort of accusations needs links to respectable sources. 7 month before 9/11 (February 11, 2001), this administration was in its first month of governing (the President having just delivered the first "State of the Union" address; the kitchen staff still washing the dishes from the inaugural banquet) and merely preparing for the fight on tax cuts and the "No Child Left Behind" legislation projects. To imply, they have already implemented a new spying program as well is to give their efficiency way too much credit...

I think, the blogger, whom you copy-pasted here, got confused and confused you...

They have done more that is contrary to the Constitution and have by many Constitutional scholar's violated more than any other administration in history.

Worse even than Nixon's?.. Wow...