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.

...if one chooses to weight openess over security, 1) one has to admit to choosing "acceptable" numbers of deaths over doing everything possible to limit those deaths. In other words, 2) Democrats have no plan "B", just criticisms of Plan "A".

2 lies in one short paragraph, enumerated for your reading pleasure and to facilitate discussion:

1) There are strong arguments that the opposite is true -- that government authorities are more effective at targeting real threats when they operate under "openness" constraints. Given the social nature of bureaucracies, oversight = efficiency = effectiveness. More effective government is more able to minimize dangers to its citizenry.

2) Bills that include timetables for action in the Iraq occupation are Plan B by definition. Bills that require greater federal emphasis on hardening civilian targets, that increase funding for NDT of shipping containers that are being offloaded at American ports, that improve response efforts which mitigate the effectiveness of terrorist strikes -- these are Plans B, C, D.....

Surely you wingers understand the value of neutering ones enemies, as opposed to eliminating them? The latter is a sexed up fantasy masquerading as a plan. The former is how real wars of attrition are won.

As an aside I wonder if there is a comparison to how data-mining info by commercial interests compares in scope to the DOJ's. Somehow I doubt that kind of balance will be in evidence.-- shooter242

Thanks for bringing this up: commercial interests can amass far too much data on citizens without oversight. Thank K Street; we have the best Congress that money can buy and corporate data mining lobbyists pay for their junkets. Write your representatives and complain about it.

Here you are, complaining about the Democrats again. They have been in office for four months. They have had a lot to do in that period.

It's possible that they do some things well and some things poorly. I don't think the President should be allowed to break the law and spy on us in secret without accountability. If Democrats allow that, that is a ground for criticizing them, no matter how wonderful they are on other issues.

I have seen frontline broadcast some of the strongest pro boy king propaganda to have come down the pike. I do not expect much from this but hope I am wrong.

PBS is no different than most of the other networks as they are bought and paid for as well and are far from being a free and independent arm of freedom.

These types of programs hardly ever cause any public outcry because they only scratch the surface of these issues and that is exactly what their intention is so they can later say if need be, see we reported on these things on such and such a date. This is a cover your ass type of ploy so as to look the part of watchdog but without having any teeth.

This is all window dressing for the dumbed down masses who need to be told what to think and when to think it.

That Schiff-Flake amendment is as useless as a non-binding war resolution. What's the point of making a law that says another law can't be broken, especially when that law has been broken for years? Is that supposed to make investigations unnecessary? Is that supposed to make it all better?

I have very mixed feelings about that bill, to put it mildly. The only conceivable benefit is that it completely eliminates the administration's argument that Congress, with the AUMF, implicitly granted them statutory authority to violate FISA (since now Congress is explicitly requiring all eavesdropping in compliance with FISA).

But since the administration does not recognize Congress' power to compel eavesdropping in compliance with FISA, and since the current law already provides for EXACTLY that same language ("exclusive means"), what is the point -- other than pretending to act -- in enacting a law that the administraiton claims the power to violate, especially when their five years worth of violations have not really been investigated or resolved?