No-Such-Agency, Wired, and the Resulting Circus.

Wired.com

Wired made waves with their cover story this week outlining the NSA's huge ongoing projects.  One in Utah and the other in Tennessee. The author James Bamford has mad a career out of following and writing about the NSA and is probably the outstanding civilian expert on the subject.  In his article he references several sources as former employees and even traveled to the site of the Utah data center project outing the NSA's ambitious plans.  Plans that appear to include eavesdropping on every single bit of communications worldwide - including yours.  I highly recommend reading the entire article.  It gets more and more juicy as you go.

None of it surprised me one bit.

Not even this video:

I fully expect the head of the NSA to deny any domestic wiretapping as that is in keeping with the letter of the law.  What I find interesting is the very carefully worded question from Representative Johnson to General Alexander (at about a minute into the video) and subsequent answer.  The crux being that the sender and recipient are both in the US.  Currently it is technically illegal for the NSA to wiretap within the US without a warrant from a FISA court.  Unless they "think" the other party is on foreign soil.  Thanks to a presidential (Bush) order that is still in effect (Obama).

That the NSA has and does wiretap US citizens is a well known fact.  I suggest the Wikipedia article for background and sources on this.  

The one thing that I find fishy in the whole debacle is that General Alexander did not seem to be aware of James Bamford or even that Representative Johnson misquoted his name as "Bashford".  Really?  The head of our largest "intelligence" agency isn't familiar with a man that has written at least 4 books about his organization dating to the early 80's...  Really?  Not buying any of the NSA's bullshit here at my undisclosed location...

EFF.ORG