According to President Bush, the illegal NSA domestic espionage program he ordered was narrowly targeted against people known to have Al Qaeda links. However, it appears that, as with his previous false claims that espionage only happened with a warrant, that this claim was on its face untrue: Spy Agency Data After Sept. 11 Led F.B.I. to Dead Ends By LOWELL BERGMAN, ERIC LICHTBLAU, SCOTT SHANE and DON VAN NATTA Jr. Published: January 17, 2006 WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 - In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month. But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans. F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy. [...] President Bush has characterized the eavesdropping program as a "vital tool" against terrorism; Vice President Dick Cheney has said it has saved "thousands of lives." But the results of the program look very different to some officials charged with tracking terrorism in the United States. [...] "We'd chase a number, find it's a schoolteacher with no indication they've ever been involved in international terrorism - case closed," said one former F.B.I. official, who was aware of the program and the data it generated for the bureau. "After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration." [...] Rest of article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/politics/17spy.html I again plead with all of you who care about the future your children live in to call your congressional representatives and demand that action be taken. Congress has already largely forgotten about this -- a few weeks is a long time in the memories of politicians. It is up to you remind them. If you do not, you will have no one to blame but yourself. "All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing." -- Edmund Burke Perry --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo@metzdowd.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]