Bush and AT&T

A few people in the Bush Administration seems to have forgotten who the government works for. It works for us. There is a reason we are a nation of laws. Bush and his top advisers have repeatedly shown that they are not to be trusted. Just this week, Bush has shown he will abuse our nation's security for political purposes. Americablog has a story on Bush getting AT&T to help him out:

If this lawsuit is true, it likely constitutes the largest mass invasion of privacy in American history.

According to an AT&T whistleblower, the telephone giant made available to a government snoop every single phone call you made, every single email you wrote, every single online video or text chat you ever had, a list of every Web site or chat room you ever visited, copies of every photo you've ever downloaded or emailed or received, so government spies could go through it and do whatever it is they do when they peep into your private life.

Here's more from Bloomberg:

A former AT&T Inc. technician who has provided evidence in a lawsuit against the company over a U.S. domestic-spying program said the government was given access to AT&T customers' phone calls and e-mail.

The technician said in a statement yesterday that cables and equipment installed at an AT&T office in San Francisco for the National Security Agency ``were tapping into'' circuits carrying customers' dial-in services.

``Based on my understanding of the connections and equipment at issue, it appears the NSA is capable of conducting what amounts to vacuum-cleaning surveillance of all the data crossing the Internet, whether that be people's e mail, Web surfing or any other data,'' said Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, in the statement.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based privacy-rights group, says information provided by Klein bolsters its lawsuit accusing AT&T, the biggest U.S. phone company, of providing the NSA access to databases holding details of millions of customers' calls and Internet communications without their permission.

Bush and his political friends have already shown what they can do by distorting public data on their political opponents. Unless there is proper oversight, how can anyone be sure what they will do or not do with private data? We don't need a government that spies on Americans, we need a government that remembers the first three words of the US Constitution and the fourth amendment.