More Details Emerge On Domestic Spying Programs

The feed brings us this NYTimes story giving new details on the telecom carriers' cooperation with secret NSA (and other) domestic spying programs. One revelation is that the Drug Enforcement Agency has been running a program since the 1990s to collect the phone records of calls from US citizens to Latin America in order to catch narcotics traffickers. Another revelation is what exactly the NSA asked for in 2001 that Qwest balked at supplying. According to the article, it was access to the company's most localized communications switches, which primarily carry domestic calls.

Comments

Re:In Communist America..

[QuantumG]

That's not a democracy you're describing.. it's a constitutional republic. Which, ya know, is probably a heck of a lot better than a pure democracy, but seeing as the majority of Americans don't even know the difference between the two, what hope is there?

Well, "neo" means "like or similar to"

[falconwolf]

Actually "neo" does not mean that. Neo means new or modern ie "neoconservative" means new conservative. Neo is good for neologisms or new words.

Falcon

Re:there's 2 ways to look at this

[Derek Loev]

As far as the war on drugs comment goes, it may not have affected you in a negative way, but I doubt it benefited you either (or anybody). Something like $500 billion spent and has there been any serious improvement?

Re:In Communist America..

[The One and Only]

Considering that America is both a democracy *and* a constitutional republic, evidently neither do you. A democracy is any system in which the population at large controls (in theory, is) the government. A constitutional system is one in which a specific set of rules, known as the "constitution", limits the authority of the government. A republic is any system of government where (a) there is no monarchy and (b) government officials are supposed to represent some subset of the population.

Nineteenth-century America is an example of an undemocratic republic--only male landowners could vote originally, though by the current day all adult citizens can vote. Current-day Britain is an example of a democratic, constitutional monarchy--while it is not a republic, there is still an (unwritten) constitution limiting the monarchy (otherwise it would be an absolute monarchy), and democracy exists.