***SCROLL FOR UPDATES***

(h/t Drudge)

The media is still buzzing, and will continue to buzz, over the recently leaked NSA phone call data collection program, until they're able to create a new bogus scandal to attack the president with.

What we all learned over the past few days that most of the nation's major phone companies are giving data on their customers' phone calls to the NSA to help fight terrorism. This has nothing to do with monitoring content of calls, the NSA is just searching for patterns of calls, and who's calling who. Despite this information the media has continued deceptively to use the word "monitoring" in their headlines and the left is predictably screaming "invasion of privacy". As usual, the ACLU is leading the privacy pack, but we learned yesterday that they are secretly collecting data on their members for fund-raising purposes! Where's the lefty outrage about that?

Before I tell you about the latest development, be sure you're up to date by reading my previous posts, here and here.

Now the one thing I hadn't mentioned is that Democrats and Republicans in both houses have been briefed about this program, so this isn't some sort of shock that they should pretend to be outraged about, simply because USA Today put this article out in perfect time to hurt the nomination of General Hayden for the new CIA chief position. Hayden is the former head of the NSA. This morning Fox & Friends went as far as to say that the program is really just an extension of the old Project Echelon, and if you read about Echelon, that seems to be the case.

That all said, today we learn that the NY Times already covered this story.... LAST DECEMBER!

This lengthy NY Times piece, dated December 24, 2005, basically reported all of what yesterday's USA Today reported, if not more. So the question you have to ask is: "Why did USA Today treat this like some sort of exclusive story they broke?" Of course we know the answer to that question, again, it's because former NSA head General Hayden was just nominated for the top position at the CIA, and clearly some axe grinders at the NSA (in classic liberal fashion) have decided, once again, to put politics before national security.

I won't bore you with a bunch of boring excerpts from the Times article, since it's basically all what you just read in the USA Today yesterday, but here's a taste:

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.

Officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have knowledge of parts of the program say the N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said.

Again, this is the same story, but the point is that the NY Times already reported this 5 months ago!!! The only thing I can see that USA Today added was the information about the specific phone companies who are passing along the data to the NSA. This hasn't stopped nervous nelly politicians from both sides of the aisle in Washington from expressing shock and outrage.

Before we learned about this new twist, Newt Gingrich joined the fellas at Hannity & Colmes for a chat about this no longer secret program. There was a lot of joking about Newt agreeing more with Alan about this one, but when you break it down, Newt agreed with the program and it's motives, but he feels that the administration needs to be more honest and upfront about it. I would say that's a reasonable request except for the fact that the NSA probably wants the program to be secret for a reason: If the program becomes public (as it now has thanks to those whistleblowers leakers) the terrorist know one way that we're trying to track them. This will cause them to change methods of communication, effectively leaving us scrambling to figure out new ways to find these people before they attack us.

Hopefully we find out who these leakers are so we can thank them for putting us all in greater danger, simply for their own political motivations. I know lefties "your privacy is under attack", right? Please tell me how this hurts you? Please tell me that you truly believe that out of the billions of calls being made and added to some super computer, the NSA has sent an actual human in to pull your calls and passed the information along to Rove, Cheney and Bush who are plotting how to take you down. They see all those calls that you made to your parents for extra weed money since you've decided to stay in college for a few more years rather than get a job, and boy are they pissed! Keep telling yourselves it's true, that the NSA has the time, money, and resources to pay attention to what you're doing unless you've been making repeated calls to a phone number that's linked to an address that simply reads: 123 Cave Rd., Cave, Afghanistan

***UPDATE***
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I just found this great San Francisco Chronical article that explains how this NSA "data mining" program works, and makes it more clear what a joke it is to be outraged over trumped up privacy issues. For starters:

Somewhere in America, powerful computers ingest crumbs of data about your personal life. Your income level. The kind of car you drive. Your home address. Your credit rating. All input, assimilated and analyzed at lightning speed.

The result: A piece of paper arrives in your mailbox offering you 10 percent off an oil change at your local service station.

That, in a nutshell, is data mining as practiced for more than a decade by companies around the world to target current and potential customers. The methods have changed since the old days of reverse telephone directories and mailing lists, but the basic objective is the same. And data mining of some type, experts agree, is almost certainly what is behind the National Security Agency's reportedly successful efforts to obtain the phone records of tens of millions of Americans from private telecommunications companies.

As I mentioned ealier, the ACLU, leader of the outraged, is doing this for fundraising purposes and we aren't hearing a peep from the left.

More from the San Francisco Chronicle, on tracking our digital footprints:

"Data mining is going through data from the past, historical data, and predicting what is likely to happen in the future based on patterns in the data," said Ken Bendix, president of North American operations at KXEN Inc., a company headquartered in San Francisco that develops data mining software for business applications.

It is used by credit card companies to spot spending patterns that suggest a card has been stolen and by marketing companies who use enormous databases to target advertising.

The technique has been gaining in popularity in the private sector thanks to advancements in computing technology and the mathematics underlying the software, Bendix said.

"The data is very rarely at the individual level," Bendix said. "When people are doing these data mining analyses, they don't care that you are you. They don't care what your name is or what your social security number is. All they care about is what group you fit into and how you relate to everybody else out there."

More on the history and theory behond this program (of course before it was compromised, and terrorists have now been tipped off)

The program, the brainchild of President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser John Poindexter, collapsed under public and political criticism in 2003. But the idea lived on, said Forno, who lectured on information warfare at the National Defense University from 2001 to 2003 and participated in the 2000 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Information Security Education Research Project.

"TIA may have died on paper," he said. "But it got parceled out to various other agencies, including the NSA."

The NSA's interest in what is essentially copies of tens of millions of old phone bills is not hard to understand, Forno and other analysts said.

In theory, a powerful computer could process all those numbers and find a link between a phone in, say, Iowa to a phone in an al Qaeda training camp on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border -- even by way of dozens of other phones, linkages far too scattered for a human eye to notice. And the search wouldn't necessarily stop there.

"You have these phone numbers, you might also at a minimum run them against credit reporting companies," Forno said. "Local state DMV records. Tax records. Business employment records. All those other resources might help you narrow down your search."

While most of the criticism we see and hear is about privacy concerns, but it seems that there might be legitimate criticism over how useful the program might actually be.

But while the program's defenders insist it is a crucial instrument in the U.S. war on terror, some private security experts question its usefulness.

"We're looking for a needle in a haystack," said Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security Inc. in Mountain View. "Dumping more hay on the pile doesn't necessarily get you anywhere."

Again, this may be a legitimate criticism, but shouldn't we encourage our government to at least do everything they can, in hopes that they might find that needle in a haystack? Or should we just assume we won't find anything and let those needles hijack planes and fly them in to buildings, killing thousands of people? Allah-hu-haystack!

Read the entire article here...

***UPDATE***
Michelle Malkin remarks on a Washington Post poll, showing that Americans support the NSA's efforts. Michelle also has a column in the NY Post today in which she thanks the NSA for actually doing their job. In reading it I become annoyed again at the fact that the left is upset over this non-issue, while they aren't outraged at the illegally leaked information that compromises security, and again, they aren't mad at the heros of the "privacy" movement, the ACLU, for data mining for fund-raising purposes.

Others (some of these are from yesterday, I'll try to update as I come across new posts):
Others:
Hot Air, The Moderate Voice, Sister Toldjah, Stop the ACLU, Confederate Yankee, Outside the Beltway, AJ Strata, Rick Moran, Macsmind, Michelle Malkin, The Sandbox, Flopping Aces, Ninth State, Sensible Mom, Nathan Branfield, OKIE on the LAM, The View From North Central Idaho, GroupIntel, The Unalienable Right, Flap's Blog, Don't Go Into The Light, Donkey Stomp, Independent Conservative, Iowa Voice, Wizbang, Left Wing = Hate, Amber, Small Town Veteran, Joust the Facts, A Lady's Ruminations, Gateway Pundit, Michelle Malkin 1, Michelle Malkin 2, Michelle Malkin 3, Chickenhawk Express, Riehl World View 1, Riehl World View 2, A Blog For All, The Political Pit Bull, Blogs For Bush, UrbanGrounds, Captain's Quarters