(partially cross-posted at Expose the Left)
***SCROLL FOR UPDATES***

So I get out of the shower and see if Drudge has anything that I missed, and I see a picture of one decent looking chick and another regular chick (see here) above the headline - Supporters of Lebanon protest outside Israeli consulate in NY.... But when I click the headline I'm taken to this Reuters photo in one of Yahoo! News' photo slideshows:

The caption attached to the photo (just in case they decide to change it):

Supporters of Lebanon protest outside the Israeli consulate in New York, July 18, 2006. REUTERS/Chip East (UNITED STATES)

These are supporters of Lebanon? Where is there a sign about Lebanon in that whole lot? One of the signs I see reads:

"ALLAH (swt) WILL DESTROY THE TERRORIST STATE OF ISRAEL"

Below the text is a burning Israeli flag with the Star of David morphed with a swastika. Additionally we can see that the bottom of the sign says "______ Society". We can't make out the words before "society", but I'd be awfully interested to know what society this is.

The other sign we see is worse than the first. It shows a big picture of the White House and in giant black letters simply states:

ISLAM WILL DOMINATE

Excuse me a moment, I have to make a call...

(button pushing noises, followed by ringing)

NSA: Hello, NSA?
Randy: Hey, I just emailed you a link to a photo of some suspicious characters who are walking around NYC (where a large part of 9/11 took place) holding signs of the White House and saying that Islam will dominate. Can you check that out, and keep an eye on these guys? Maybe tap a few phones or at least watch the records, and follow some banking transactions?
NSA: Let me take a look at my email sir... Okay got it!
Randy: You see the picture?
NSA: Yeah... I don't know what we can do about this though... I mean, if we track this guy, the left will sue for racial profiling and attacking free speech... You know, because someone will leak what we're doing.
Randy: Yeah, the leaks suck... But screw the left, your job is to protect us.
NSA: You're right, we'll do what we can and pray for now leaks... It's too bad that the left in this country loves free speech for terrorists and their sympathizers over anyone else, and wishes we would be attacked before we act...
Randy: It's also too bad that liberal media idiots like Reuters calls these people "supporters of Lebanon" when it's clear they are nothing more than Islamofacists.
NSA: Yup. Anyway, I'll pass this on the the appropriate department. Thanks.
Randy: Thank you. Bye.

Okay, that got stupid because I lost my train of thought when I had an actual phone call, but you get my point. First, that Reuters is really a POS for calling these people "supporters of Lebanon", when first of all their signs don't even come close to reflecting that, and second their signs are blatantly and unambigously Islamofacist in nature! Unless Reuters can show me an Arabic translation where "Islam Will Dominate" means "I Support Lebanon", they are again siding with the terrorist point of view. F U Reuters.

***UPDATE***
Michelle Malkin has updated a post she wrote earlier on the virtual Hezbollah infiltration of America, now adding pictures including the one that is the subject of this post, though she found it at Gateway Pundit.

Gateway Pundit has a handful of other pictures of equally outrageous, yet expected signs. Also thanks to GP, I now know what that "society" I mentioned earlier is - The Islamic Thinkers Society. Looks like covering the insanity over there would require an entirely separate blog, so I'll set that aside for the time being.

Additionally, Michelle Malkin links us to photos from everyone's favorite internet watchdog photographer, "Zombie". Zombie snapped shots at a rally in San Francisco last Thursday, which actually had some people from both sides. Guess which side behaved with civility and respect, and which side acted like a bunch of deranged animals?

My favorite part is when we see a photo of the terrorist sympathizers adjusting their kaffiyeh-masks, using the reflection of a window, are interrupted by a couple of police officers. The masked men try to say that they weren't planning to do anything violent, to which one cop replied:

"Then why are you dressing up like a terrorist like that?"

Classic!

Bryan at HotAir links to Zombie as well, eerily saying “They’re heeeere.”

***UPDATE***
Malkin has a new post up entitled "More Support For Israel", in which she includes a link to me! It isn't the first time she's linked to me, but one of very few times and for a little blogger like myself I feel pretty honored. Thanks Michelle.

By the way, earlier I forgot to link to Michelle's latest column at the Jewish World Review entitled - "Hezbollah is already here", in which she destroys your false sense of security you feel when you think Hezbollah is on the other side of the world.

Oh, and I also wanted to make note of what Hezbollah's spokesman said yesterday, sense there was all but a media blackout on it. At least we have blogs and WND:

"We have 2,000 volunteers who have registered since last year," Hezbollah spokesman Mojtaba Bigdeli told Reuters yesterday. "They have been trained and they can become fully armed. We are ready to dispatch them to every corner of the world to jeopardize Israel and America's interests. We are only waiting for the supreme leader's green light to take action. If America wants to ignite World War III … we welcome it."

Can you hear me now? Consider that before you brush off the people we see holding these signs as some harmless fringe loons. Loons they may be, but harmless and few in number they are not.

*****UPDATE*****
Some low-life lefty blogger TBogg, who I had never heard of, but is apparently pretty popular has spun (what, dishonesty from a liberal?!) my post to act as if it was about me looking for "internets babes", based on my brief joking mention about the two girls in the photo displayed on Drudge. Incase anyone else had trouble interpreting what the post was about, and what the mention of the "chicks" had to do with it, below is the response I added to TBogg's comments:

Hey, way to totally ignore the point of my post genius. Well, what should I expect from liberals who are incapable of honesty.

The part about the chicks was barely a blip/mention that had absolutely nothing to do with the point. The "chicks" part was more for a chuckle as I totally busted Reuters on their lie.

If anyone cares to check out the real post, it has nothing to do with wanting to see chicks and being disappointed when I saw Islamofacists. Only a simple liberal or one deliberately being dishonest (shocking!) would think that.

I clicked the link at Drudge to see what the story was. The link, oddly, was just going to a slideshow of images, rather than an actual story, and for some reason lands you on pic #308, which was odd considering that Drudge used a different image on his page above the link.

Now that I've broken that down for you geniuses, HERE'S THE ACTUAL POINT OF THE POST, IF YOU HAD CHOSEN TO READ IT!

Reuters refers to these men as "supporters of Lebanon". Why? Not one sign in the picture says anything about Lebanon. It doesn't even have the far left/arab talking points "end the occupation"... No, these are Islamofacists who's signs say "Allah Will Destroy the Terrorist State Israel" above a burning Israeli flag with the star of david morphed with a swastika, and the other sign has a photo of the White House and says "Islam Will Dominate"

What the hell does "Islam Will Dominate" and Allah destroying Israel has to do with supporting Lebanon. Reuters wouldn't even have been accurate to simply call them Hezbollah supporters, because in fact they are supporters of Islam dominating the world. NOTHING TO DO WITH LEBANON, ALL TO DO WITH ISLAM TAKING OVER THE PLANET!!!

But enjoy yourself quoting part of a post out of context and treating it like it has anything to do with the true subject of the post. I expect no better of folks on your side of the aisle.

I couldn't care less about some terrorist supporting hos standing on an Israeli flag. They're clearly idiots, and have no clue how they would be treated if they were in their motherland, by the types of people they are demonstrating in support of. The mention of them is, as I said, partly a joke, and mainly about how it was odd that Drudge linked to a separate image in the photo slideshow, when the one he displayed is part of the same slideshow.

More:
Blogs of War, Texas Rainmaker, Homemade Sin, Sister Toldjah, Assorted Babble, A Blog For All, California Conservative, Macsmind, Riehl World View, Captain's Journal, It Shines For All, Liberty and Justice, Old War Dogs, Freedom for Some, Wallstreet Café, The Lunch Counter, 4 The Little Guy, Partisan Times, Hyscience

 

In my last update on NSA phonegate I discussed some of the selective outrage of the left. Of course I have to keep wondering why the left isn't angry at the ACLU who is collecting personal information for fund-raising purposes, as opposed to the NSA, which is collecting call records with NO names or personal information attached, simply so that their supercomputers can search for patterns in billions and trillions of calls. However in the last post I specifically wondered why the left and the media aren't upset about the Echelon program (under Clinton) or Clinton's spying on pro-life political opponents. I'm not expecting an answer. As always, scroll to the bottom of this post to catch up on all past updates on the story.

While yesterday's news about BellSouth denying the USA Today story and any involvement with the NSA was weird enough, it just got weirder. Verizon is now denying the entire thing as well, leaving AT&T all alone. I wonder if they'll come out with any kind of statement in the next few days?

About Verizon (from a USA Today blog, if you can believe it):

Verizon Communications this afternoon said that it "was not asked by the (National Security Agency) to provide, nor did Verizon provide, customer records" from any of its telephone businesses "or any call data from those records."

Any media reports that say it did those things "are simply false," the company stated.

USA Today remains confident in their initial reporting.

"We’re confident in our coverage of the phone database story. We will look closely into the issues raised by the Bell South's and Verizon’s statements."

Does that sound eerily familiar to anyone? (*cough*Dan Rather*cough)

Verizon has posted their statement at their own web site here, and I've reproduced the entire thing below, because it's very important:

NEW YORK -- Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE:VZ) today issued the following statement regarding news coverage about the NSA program which the President has acknowledged authorizing against al-Qaeda:

As the President has made clear, the NSA program he acknowledged authorizing against al-Qaeda is highly-classified. Verizon cannot and will not comment on the program. Verizon cannot and will not confirm or deny whether it has any relationship to it.

That said, media reports made claims about Verizon that are simply false.

One of the most glaring and repeated falsehoods in the media reporting is the assertion that, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Verizon was approached by NSA and entered into an arrangement to provide the NSA with data from its customers’ domestic calls.

This is false. From the time of the 9/11 attacks until just four months ago, Verizon had three major businesses – its wireline phone business, its wireless company and its directory publishing business. It also had its own Internet Service Provider and long-distance businesses. Contrary to the media reports, Verizon was not asked by NSA to provide, nor did Verizon provide, customer phone records from any of these businesses, or any call data from those records. None of these companies – wireless or wireline – provided customer records or call data.

Another error is the claim that data on local calls is being turned over to NSA and that simple "calls across town" are being "tracked." In fact, phone companies do not even make records of local calls in most cases because the vast majority of customers are not billed per call for local calls. In any event, the claim is just wrong. As stated above, Verizon’s wireless and wireline companies did not provide to NSA customer records or call data, local or otherwise.

Again, Verizon cannot and will not confirm or deny whether it has any relationship to the classified NSA program. Verizon always stands ready, however, to help protect the country from terrorist attack. We owe this duty to our fellow citizens. We also have a duty, that we have always fulfilled, to protect the privacy of our customers. The two are not in conflict. When asked for help, we will always make sure that any assistance is authorized by law and that our customers’ privacy is safeguarded.

So they won't confirm or deny any relationship with the NSA, but they seem to have denied virtually everything about this "new" revelation. I suspect they can't confirm or deny a relationship, because they probably have a limited one as it pertains to wiretapping of suspected terrorists. But if you insist on knowing about it, then you really don't care about national security.

The reason these programs are secret is to catch terrorists. If they are known, terrorists will communicate a different way. Thanks, as always, to the politically motivated leakers for hurting national security again.

Anyway, this Verizon statement seems much more firm than BellSouth's statement, but as I said, either way AT&T is the last one standing. Here's the BellSouth statement, which again is a just little more ambiguous than Verizon's:

ATLANTA, May 15 /PRNewswire/ -- The following statement regarding media reports about U.S. governmental agency data collection may be attributed to BellSouth Corporation (NYSE: BLS):

There has been much speculation in the last several days about the role that BellSouth may have played in efforts by the National Security Agency (NSA) and other governmental agencies to keep our nation safe.

As a result of media reports that BellSouth provided massive amounts of customer calling information under a contract with the NSA, the Company conducted an internal review to determine the facts. Based on our review to date, we have confirmed no such contract exists and we have not provided bulk customer calling records to the NSA.

BellSouth has built a successful business because of the trust that our customers have placed with us. We will continue to take our obligations to our customers seriously.

Expose the Left has video of Brit Hume playing "Expose the Poll", smashing the deceptive polling practices of USA Today. Surprised?

Previous:
NSA Updates: Old News, No Names/Addresses Collected, BellSouth Denies Involvement, More...
USA Today NSA Story A Rehash Of December 2005 NY Times Story
ACLU Data Collection! Selective Lefty Outrage At NSA?
Today's Bogus/Manufactured NSA Anti-Civil Rights Story

 

Since my last update on the NSA calling records story, there have been a few developments...

It's unlikely you heard this reported on most other channels and shows, but as Brit Hume pointed out on Special Report in the Political Grapevine segment, the NSA program doesn't involve phone customers' names, addresses or any other personal information. Expose the Left has the video, and the whacked out liberal commenters went wild as usual. One challenged Humes credibility, while ignoring the fact that Hume was quoting the original USA Today story, but a sidebar burried on the fifth page of the story.

Hume:

Not until page five, however, does the paper report the following: “Phone customers’ names, addresses and other personal information are not being collected as part of this program.”

Scroll to the bottom of this post for links to my extensive previous posts on "Phonegate", in which I've been saying this all along. I also discussed how much more data mining businesses are doing for marketing purposes, beyond anything the NSA is doing, and of course mention out the ACLU is even obtain all kinds of personal information for fundraising purposes, while being the most outspoken about the NSA!

Here's the real deal, as I understand it, about what the NSA is doing here.... How many phone calls are made in the United States every day? I was unable to turn up a figure but I would guess it's got to be at least 500 million and could easily be over a billion, agreed? Even if you wanted to ridiculously low ball it, you'd be talking in the tens of millions. Again, that's every day. Start adding up per week, month, year and you've got even more of an insanely large pile of records. No group of people could ever sift through these. Bush and Cheney aren't sitting in a back room cross checking lists of people who made calls to DNC HQ with calls they made to their friends and sending out secret police.

What seems to be really happening, as discussed in previous posts, is that these billions and billions of all records are going in to a supercomputer that has the capabilities to search for patterns. If the complex programs find a repeated pattern of this guy calling that guy and that guy calling a cave in Afghanistan, and then another guy gets calls from that cave calls a known radicall mosque, that also makes calls to the first two guys who live in different parts of the country, it might set off a buzzer to let the NSA take a look at it. But if you are stupid enough to think that we have the time, money, people, or resources to be sitting around spying on regular Americans, I can't help you. And again, there is no dropping of eaves here, just computers filtering through call records.

I heard someone raise an interesting point about this on some debate on FNC the other day... They complained of the ineffectiveness of such a program, which is a legitimate matter for debate, but said that the NSA should be focusing on suspected terrorists, not 300 million Americans. The other person in the debate left them with their mouth hanging open when they said "how do you identify suspects?" I hadn't really thought of it that way before, but that is exactly why this program is necessary.

Another interesting fact, as I've mentioned, was that this was just a rehash of a NY Times story from December being pulled out for no other reason than to railroad the nomination of General Hayden (former NSA head) to head the CIA. Not to mention the media has to create some bogus scandal at least once every week or two to hurt the President. Well many have been saying, not only was it an old story from December, but 60 Minutes did a story on it in 2000, under Clinton, and obviously before 9/11.

The 2000 story wasn't about this exactly, but it was about something for more "intrusive" and something that the privacy pimps could actually have been concerned about. It was about a vast spy program implimented under President Clinton that apparently monitored all electronic communications:

(Dec. 18, 2005 NewsMax article)

During the 1990's under President Clinton, the National Security Agency monitored millions of private phone calls placed by U.S. citizens and citizens of other countries under a super secret program code-named Echelon.

On Friday, the New York Times suggested that the Bush administration has instituted "a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices" when it "secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without [obtaining] court-approved warrants."

But in fact, the NSA had been monitoring private domestic telephone conversations on a much larger scale throughout the 1990s - all of it done without a court order, let alone a catalyst like the 9/11 attacks.

In February 2000, for instance, CBS "60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Kroft introduced a report on the Clinton-era spy program by noting:

"If you made a phone call today or sent an e-mail to a friend, there's a good chance what you said or wrote was captured and screened by the country's largest intelligence agency. The top-secret Global Surveillance Network is called Echelon, and it's run by the National Security Agency."

NSA computers, said Kroft, "capture virtually every electronic conversation around the world."

Echelon expert Mike Frost, who spent 20 years as a spy for the Canadian equivalent of the National Security Agency, told "60 Minutes" that the agency was monitoring "everything from data transfers to cell phones to portable phones to baby monitors to ATMs."

Mr. Frost detailed activities at one unidentified NSA installation, telling "60 Minutes" that agency operators "can listen in to just about anything" - while Echelon computers screen phone calls for key words that might indicate a terrorist threat.

The "60 Minutes" report also spotlighted Echelon critic, then-Rep. Bob Barr, who complained that the project as it was being implemented under Clinton "engages in the interception of literally millions of communications involving United States citizens."

One Echelon operator working in Britain told "60 Minutes" that the NSA had even monitored and tape recorded the conversations of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond.

Still, the Times repeatedly insisted on Friday that NSA surveillance under Bush had been unprecedented, at one point citing anonymously an alleged former national security official who claimed: "This is really a sea change. It's almost a mainstay of this country that the NSA only does foreign searches."

Knock Knock!
Who's There?
The ACLU?
Oh crap, really?!
Nah man, you're Democrats, carry on as you were

Need more? How about Clinton's vast spying programs, targeting political enemies? Front Page Magazine has the story in this article dated February 22, 2006. A few excerpts below:

In 1994, Clinton administration Attorney General Janet Reno launched infiltrators, wiretaps, mail monitoring, and a wide range of other spying activities in a massive coordinated effort that included the FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; U.S. Postal inspectors; the U.S. Marshalls Service; and other Federal and local law enforcement agencies.President Bill Clinton had acted decisively to fight what he and First Lady Hillary Clinton deemed the most dangerous terrorist threat facing America: conservative Christians.

This huge Clinton surveillance scheme was VAAPCON, the Violence Against Abortion Providers Task Force. According to the U.S. Justice Department, VAAPCON “was charged with determining whether there was a nationwide conspiracy to commit acts of violence against reproductive health care providers.” The more than 900 targets of all this surveillance included the Christian Coalition, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Women’s Coalition for Life, Feminists for Life, Americans United for Life, the 600,000-member Concerned Women for America, the National Rifle Association, the American Life League, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, and even then-Roman Catholic Cardinal of New York John O’Connor.

Read the rest of this very important and lengthy article here.

If you read that article, you'll certainly be shocked at all of the anti-free speech activities overseen by Clinton. What is particularly shocking is that what we read in this article sounds exactly like what the ACLU and Democrats scream is their big concerns over Bush administration policies, though they never cite any example of the NSA's data collection being used for political reasons. Here we have what Clinton did all laid out, but where's the MSM and where were they at the time? That is the outrage here. They don't report the actually shady things that Clinton was doing, while they blow up, misreport, spin and speculate about everything that President Bush is doing to protect us in the post 9/11 world. It's times like these I'm just infuriated at the state of the media in our country. It's almost physically sickening.

We have one other revelation today as well. You know how the original USA Today article that set this whole storm in motion said that Verizon, AT&T, and BellSouth were all handing over call records to the NSA for this program? Well BellSouth is totally denying that now... I don't know what will come of this, but I suspect we'll hear more in the next couple days:

BellSouth said in a statement that it doesn't contract with the National Security Agency to supply customer calling information.

"As a result of media reports that BellSouth provided massive amounts of customer calling information under a contract with the NSA," it said Monday, "the company conducted an internal review to determine the facts. Based on our review to date, we have confirmed no such contract exists and we have not provided bulk customer calling records to the NSA."

Asked to define "bulk customer calling records," Battcher said: "We are not providing any information to the NSA, period." He said he did not know whether BellSouth had a contract with the Department of Defense, which oversees the NSA.

read on here...

That's odd... So are we to believe that the NSA has obtained these somehow on their own? Or is this just some sort of clever wording, but BellSouth is actually providing the records through some other method? Or could it be that USA Today used Dan Rather's unimpeachable sources for the story? Or better yet, maybe they used Jason Leopold's sources.

Previous:
USA Today NSA Story A Rehash Of December 2005 NY Times Story
ACLU Data Collection! Selective Lefty Outrage At NSA?
Today's Bogus/Manufactured NSA Anti-Civil Rights Story

 

***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***
s
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

 

(h/t Stop the ACLU)

Of course everyone is talking about the latest non"scandal" by the media, over the NSA obtaining data collection on phone calls (numbers seeking patterns, not content). I have an extensive post up about this from earlier, but I thought the latest development deserved it's own post. Before I get to the latest development, I have to point out again that there is really nothing that can be done with this information unless your records show you're constantly calling a cell phone that's located in a cave in Afghanistan.. then maybe you should be a little concerned. But even still, what makes you liberals think that the NSA has the time, money, or resources to pay attention to you?

Now you're not going to believe the latest. You know the "civil liberties" group the ACLU? You know, the creeps who come out to oppose anything traditional or right in the world, but instead support pedophile groups like NAMBLA, vicious people who protest at soldiers' funerals, the KKK, etc. etc. etc. This group is arguably more evil than the United Nations, but that's another story.

Anyway, as you probably are aware, the ACLU is one of these groups that cries foul any time President Bush takes action to protect us. Today was no exception, and they're "demanding" a Congressional Investigation. Read up at the ACLU's own page.

What's interesting this time is that the ACLU is using shady data collection methods themselves, and they're doing it for fund-raising, not national security. (h/t Stop the ACLU)

From the San Francisco Gate

The American Civil Liberties Union is using sophisticated technology to collect a wide variety of information about its members and donors in a fund-raising effort that has ignited a bitter debate over its leaders' commitment to privacy rights.

Some board members say the extensive data collection makes a mockery of the organization's frequent criticism of banks, corporations and government agencies for their practice of accumulating data on people for marketing and other purposes.

Again this isn't even national security, it's fund-raising!... Should we expect outrage from the usual suspects? Don't count on it.

The group’s new data collection practices were implemented without the board’s approval or knowledge and were in violation of the ACLU’s privacy policy at the time, according to Michael Meyers, vice president of the organization and a frequent internal critic. He said he had learned about the new research by accident Nov. 7 during a meeting of the committee that is organizing the group’s Biennial Conference in July.

He objected to the practices, and the next day, the privacy policy on the group’s Web site was changed. “They took out all the language that would show that they were violating their own policy,” Meyers said. “In doing so, they sanctified their procedure while still keeping it secret.”

What's new about that? Everytime a far left group gets caught doing something stupid, they quickly run to change their web site. This is just how the dishonest left operates.

Read on...

Anyway, the main point is the selective outrage from the left and the media. Don't expect a huge front page USA Today story on this tomorrow, and of course it won't be a lead story on all the news programs. And don't expect the liberal blogs to hammer the ACLU either. They'll just turn their back and pretend they never heard about this, until the next time some child molester needs his "free speech" defending, and they'll once again call on the heroic ACLU.

 

***UPDATE***
Hot Air says that this is old news, and has video of the President's comments. Expose the Left has video of the President's comments as well.

***UPDATE - SURPRISE, SURPRISE MEDIA LYING... SAYS NSA "MONITORING" CALLS***

No one sould be shocked, but once again the media is lying. Here's a Yahoo! News search on 'NSA monitoring'. Dig through and find your favorite offender.

As always, I like to pick on the Yahoo.com home page... The top headline currently reads: NSA monitoring phone calls of millions in U.S. (see screen shot at right). What's odd is when you click the link, the page you land on has a different, but still dishonest headline: NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls. Wrong again guys, no one is "monitoring" and they don't have a database of your "calls", they have a list of call records, and no information about the content of the calls.

***UPDATE***
Both sides of the blogosphere are weighing in. The left is looney as ever, you've got to scroll down to see what the DailyKOS has to say. Outside the Beltway sums the media spin of this up in one line (versus my rambling): "Calls. Call records. Same thing, right? Um, no." Scroll to the bottom for more blogger reaction...

(original post below)
The media and liberal leakers inside the NSA decided that they hadn't undermined national security in an effort to hurt the President lately, so USA Today stepped up. My guess is that they figure that the President's numbers have virtually bottomed out for the time being, even going up in the most recent Fox poll, and there wasn't really enough controversy around the President's new CIA chief nominee General Hayden, so USA Today thought they'd get some anonymous sources together to "expose" a program, and make it sound like something it's not, and put a bunch of pictures of Hayden all over the article.

I wonder if we should expect John Kerry to be on one of the Sunday shows this weekend commeding these leakers for this "good leak". Either way, don't be surprised if the media tries to turn this in to this week's "Bush administration scandal" though. They do this constantly, and almost always the story eventually fades away but the fact that they manufactured a controversy hurts the Presdient enough. The media is fully aware of this, and they constantly use this hit and run tactic to hurt him, even when the war on terror suffers as a result.

(slight tangent alert)
The old saying I heard once is that it's like being told you have cancer, a few weeks later you go in for surgery to remove it and the doctor says "there's nothing here", and sows you back up. Sure, you're not dead, but you're stuck with that huge scar now. This is why the media just lobs these things out one after another, and we've seen the impact. Not that we haven't all proved the media is liberally biased hundreds of times, I think public opinion about the economy is the perfect example to use. I explain in this post that almost half of the country isn't aware that we aren't in a recession. Here's the main point, recession isn't an opinion, either we are in one or not. Only 51% of the public are aware that we are not, while 30% think we are, and 19% aren't sure. Whether you agree on motives, can we agree that the media isn't doing it's job if almost half of the country doesn't know the FACT that we aren't in a recession. I'm not even going to list of job growth, unemployment, housing, wages, GDP, consumer confidence, consumer spending, productivity, etc. etc. Although I do want to mention, incase you missed it, that April 2006 came in second for all time tax revenue taken in by the government. Yes, you read that right libs, lower taxes, higher tax revenue.
(end tangent)

Back to this NSA "scandal", here's the deal... You've probably heard in plenty of court cases that are covered on the news, where the court obtains "phone records". In case you weren't aware, the phone companies have a record of all of your calls. Not listening in, just what numbers you dialed, that kind of thing. After 9/11 the NSA asked the major phone companies for access to these records. Three companies, AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth complied, while Qwest didn't (and has not). Oh yeah, and the part you're going to hear so much about, these records were obtained "without warrants".

So you better board up the windows and start corresponding only via ham radio or some type of morris code device, because you know evil Bush and his NSA minions are spying on your calls... You know because they have the time and the resources to listen in on you liberals calling your parents to send you more money while you start yet another year of college, instead of entering the real world.

Basically the NSA is looking for calling patterns, etc. in hopes of catching Al Qaeda. Just kidding, it's really Bush's latest method of voter intimidation.

As I said, this USA Today story is the big exclusive, and as usual relies COMPLETELY on anonymous sources. What a convenient time for this to happen, as the former head of the NSA is up for the CIA chief job. Just a coincidence I'm sure, right USA Today and liberal leakers? How lucky that they managed to stick a bunch of pictures of him in the article too!

The article is extremely long and extremely repetitive, so I'll just give you the opening excerpt, and let you read the whole thing at your leisure.

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

So what's the big deal? I don't get it, but you can rest assured the libs and "civil liberties" groups will be screaming about this, despite never explaining their problem with it. They'll shout "privacy", but won't explain how anyone is being harmed, and don't expect them to protest YellowBook for publicly publishing phone numbers.

Anyway, the article goes on and on, repeating the same boring information over and over hoping that a gigantic article will make you believe that there is really some controversy here. To the libs that this is going to set off, I'd like to ask you what you'd do if a terrorist attack happens, and this program, or the terrorist surveillance program could have tipped us off? Would you say, "but at least no one heard me call my Grandma!", or would you scream at the President for not protecting us, that's what it all comes down to. Some goes for open borders liberals, if a terrorist came in to the country via the Mexican border.

Others:
Before I get to the Right side of the blogosphere, I have to point out this sarcastic line from the DailyKOS, that is hilarious for a reason they didn't intend:

Obviously, they're fighting terror. Because every single American might just be participating in terrorism. So they really need to keep track of all of our phone calls. It's obvious, right? Obvious, but not particularly legal, though since when has that stopped BushCo?

Again, that was sarcasm, so I'd like to ask the KOS kids: Are you advocating racial profiling then? You are implying that this isn't to fight terrorism because it's EVERYONE... then how do you propose they choose who to keep phone RECORDS (not calls) of? I submit that if the NSA was only keeping records of brown skinned people or Muslims you'd be screaming racial profiling. Let's face it, you'd rather we get attacked and then blame the President for not stopping it.

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

***UPDATE - MORE LEFTY CRAZINESS***
Glenn Greenwald has an long post up about this, and I don't even need to get past the first two paragraphs to realize what a pile it is:

I just this morning read the obviously significant USA Today article detailing the fact that the NSA is maintaining a comprehensive data base of every call made by every American – both internationally and domestically – whether they have anything to do with terrorism or not, obviously all of this without warrants or oversight of any kind. I'm not going to pretend to have all of the legal issues figured out in two hours, and so I won't yet opine as to whether there are serious grounds for arguing either that this is legal or that it’s illegal.

But there is one highly significant, and revealing, item buried in the USA Today article regarding Qwest's refusal to cooperate with the NSA’s demands (and it heroic refusal to capitulate to the NSA’s intimidation tactics and threats) that it turn over its customers' calling data:

First Glenn says that the NSA "is maintaining a comprehensive data base of every call...", but in his very next paragraph notes how Qwest stood up to the big bad NSA. I don't think I need to explain to anyone that they clearly don't have a "data base of every call" if they don't have Qwests information, not to mention all the cell phone companies, which is all millions of people (myself included) use these days.

I'm a little confused how this guy has such a large readership, when he begins a post with contradicting sentences. Obviously this isn't the most important thing in the world, but why would I go any further?And calling Qwest "heroic"!? You don't think that's just a little overboard? I suspect Stephan Colbert is a hero too right? Don't sue me Glenn! I'm not infringing on your free speech, I'm mocking it.

Anyway libs, get ready to change your number because you know the Bush administration is clearing out the NSA (obviously not everyone there is friendly to them) and spending the rest of their time in Washington searching for the phone numbers of anyone who voted for John Kerry and then finding out what numbers they called. You better be scared, because... well, they can't really do anything with that information anyway. This evil war criminal administration really got you this time didn't they!