To understand the nature and scope of electronic surveillance it is first necessary to understand the need that businesses have to keep track of every consumer-based electronic transaction.

Telephone companies, for example, use the term provisioning to describe the ability, in real time, to initiate a call, identify the callers, allocate resources for the call across multiple communications providers and track the time, message length, volume of data and anything else necessary to charge for the call. Information like that is as valuable in identifying and tracking persons of interest as are the contents of a given message. Once it is captured, this information is kept for purposes of billing, auditing, marketing, research and development.

The same real time requirements apply to banking, credit card companies, Internet companies and any other type of company that makes money on the basis of electronic transactions.

This information is the raw data for much of the activity associated with our government's surveillance of its citizens. Even the technology and business infrastructure necessary to aggregate and sort through this data is a normal component of business.

Not many people are aware that a single company, Amdocs, provides billing, customer relationship management (CRM) and operational support systems (OSS) for the majority of phone companies in America and many of its Internet service providers (ISPs). There is little or no awareness of of the existence of Verint, a company that manufacturers and installs much of the wire tapping equipment built into America's phone systems. And the public is almost totally unaware that a number of surveillance projects originally implemented by DARPA's Information Awareness Office under John Poindexter, still continue under different government organizations, even after TIA (Total Information Awareness) was defunded by Congress in 2004.

It did not take a giant database in the sky for the government to accomplish the level of surveillance described by projects like the Total Information Awareness project. What it did take was secrecy on the part of our government when secrecy could be assured, legal "permissions" when secrecy could not be assured, and the full compliance and cooperation of businesses that were already in the process of gathering such information.

The fact that this surveillance occurred is not the result of technology. The technology was already there. This illegal surveillance occurred because of policy decisions that were made and enforced by the government using information provided by corporations that, in the best case, were either unable or unwilling to say "No," and in the worst case, more than willing to say "Yes." That, and the complicity of Congress.

To judge by the increasing number of voices arguing against anything and everything Glenn posts:

Glenn: The earth has an atmosphere.

Argues with Stop Signs: In what universe did you dream that up?

Glenn: 2 + 2 = 4

Lost in Space: But can you prove it?

I've lost count of the number of new (and returning) contrarians that have started posting here since last Friday. As a result, I cannot help but believe that this blog is getting a huge readership. I wonder if any of them are on RNC payroll.

I would much rather Clinton never lied and teenage girls not think that oral sex is acceptable today.

I knew there had to be a reason, after thousands of years of recorded history, that they started doing that all of a sudden.

Jake,

I no longer refer to myself as a progressive. I'm a liberal and proud of it. When you say, "We've been going down hill ever since the 1960's," we'll just have to agree to disagree. I think the 60s represented a watershed moment in the history of Western civilization, a time of great promise followed by a period of great loss.

By that I mean that the promise of voter equality and equal rights under the law regardless of age, race, sex, religion or any other characteristic historically used to separate human beings one from another remains an unfulfilled promise.

If I had my way, we would teach children about sex in grade school. We would tell them how their bodies are made and make sure they understood that their bodies were their own.

By the time they reached high school age, we would encourage them to treat each other with respect and dignity in every way including sex and to understand that sex and love belong together. We would say that heavy petting including oral sex was safer than intercourse, but if they were going to have intercourse to be sure and use condoms every single time. We would teach them to open themselves in every way to all the beauty and wonder and complexity of the world and everything in it.

Yep. That's what I would do.

Yeah.

69 was an amazing year. It was the year I graduated from high school. 69 was the year of Woodstock, the first manned moon landing, the last public performance by the Beatles, the release of Led Zeppelin’s first album, the last public concert by the The Jimi Hendrix Experience, the debut of Hew Haw, the first U.S. troop withdrawals in Vietnam and the first draft lottery for Vietnam, the second manned moon landing, the first ATM (automatic teller machine), the incorporation of Wal-Mart as Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., the creation of ARPANET, mother of Internet, the implantation of the first temporary artificial heart, the murder of Sharon Tate by Charles Manson’s cult, the pilot episode of The Brady Bunch and the admission by James Earl Ray to the murder of Martin Luthor King (later retracted).

Yep, no matter how you look at it, 69 is simply amazing.