Maybe this article will open up your eyes a bit and also jog your memory of the Bush era
Electronic snooping by the state may safeguard liberty?and also threaten it
Just a few small excerpts
"In November 2002 news reports revealed the existence of a big, secret Pentagon programme called Total Information Awareness. This aimed to identify suspicious patterns of behaviour by ?data mining? (also known as ?pattern recognition?): computer-driven searches of large quantities of electronic information. After a public outcry it was dubbed, perhaps more palatably, Terrorism Information Awareness. But protests continued, and in September 2003 Congress blocked its funding."
"In July, after fierce debate, Congress imposed new limitations on government wiretapping when it renewed the expiring Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) sought by President George Bush after September 11th. The main law governing data mining, this has provided the administration with broad and unprecedented electronic-spying powers. But civil-liberties lobbies such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch say the renewed, restricted law leaves largely untouched far-reaching secret ?black? programmes, run by the NSA, which crunch data on great numbers of people, including millions of Americans. Much of that is personal financial information collected by the Treasury.
Mr Bush says that FISA helps protect citizens? liberties ?while maintaining the vital flow of intelligence?. Several hours after the president signed the bill into law, the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit, on the grounds that the executive branch?s expanded wiretapping powers violated the constitution."
http://www.economist.com/world/inter...ry_id=12295455