america was destroyed while waiting for credible sources to decide what was true.

know this: now you will
delight in my echelon
haiku-i-fy-ing

listen: echelon
grips you or if it does not
paranoia is

if paranoia
grips you or if it does not
encelon listens

the echelon debunkers of the past ten years used to say that the echelon system was impossible due to the staggering volume of communications and the likely need for human screening of keyword hits (that's da bomb). probably apocryphal lists of "echelon keywords" have circulated on the internets for as long as there have been internets.
as a matter of fact, just like french intelligence services run the babelfish system (think about it), the NSA has been inside google since it was a penny stock, directly managing the options presented to those who search for information on that system.

as to the NSA, here's what we (the People) should do: on a specified day each american citizen and authorized alien who is concerned with abuse of exectuive authorities in the civil liberties area must file a FOIA request with each likely agency for copies of any documents containing his or her own name.

the action aspires to be a snail-mail denial of service attack in guerilla bureaucratese, and i envision something like santa's exoneration in the courtroom scene of miracle on 34th street in reverse. i think tax day would be ideal.

we need some politically right-ist americans who are also interested in civil liberties to be involved too: just sticking with Answer and Truthout and Moveon and So-on would keep the action small, easily dismissed as more of the same libr'l direct action hijinks, and also provide the targeted agencies with a handy list of the political underclass -- people likely to freely assemble and petition for the redress of grievance, and such things (they'd get the list anyway, but it would cover a broad swath of the political spectrum). I'm not sure who the right libertarian guys would be.

Any ideas?
I also do childrens' parties.

Unrelatedly, some light reading:

273 p report by conyers’ staff?
http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/iraqrept.html

letter from the DOJ to certain intelligence committee members http://www.nationalreview.com/pdf/12%2022%2005%20NSA%20letter.pdf

or this legal scholar’s rejection of the arguments in that letter http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forumy/2005/12/not-authorized-by-law-domestic-spying.php

jovial saturnalia!

and plus the server-side system formerly poorly marketed as "carnivore" and now, i think, called something a little more innocuous like the Discrete Capture System 1000, er, DCS-1000... like, 5 years ago. By now it's probably up to 5000.
and key-logging with the sneak-n-peek.