Senate Intelligence Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D, Calif.) said the program is lawful and that it must be renewed by Congress every three months. She said the revelation about Verizon, reported by the London-based newspaper the Guardian, seemed to coincide with its latest renewal.
I've only ever published two diaries, neither of which amounted to a hill of shit. I'm not a writer, hell I'm not really an activist. But this fucking makes me MAD.
The Democrats and Republicans have been fighting for five years about the budget, the debt, the stimulus, jobs and what to do about those dirty bastard bankers. Five years and not much has been done.
They call this "gridlock". That means these are things they don't WANT to fix.
With the latest flurry of inaction by both parties (sequestration), school lunches are reduced, many worthwhile programs are axed, government employees are furloughed (a nice euphemism meaning fired or forced cut in pay), unemployment extension programs are stopped, pretty much everyone outside Washington DC and the 1% that runs them has been getting fucked pretty regularly. The country is in real danger of falling into another recession, when tens of millions haven't recovered from the last one.
But to keep a semi-secret country-wide orgasm of snooping hidden - phone, internet and email, of virtually every citizen, they (congress) manage to renew it every three months without fail. Behind closed doors. Walk in, say howdy to the other side, vote to extend the program, oh, wait, we need another billion or so to store the data we're collecting about U.S. Citizens.
Now, in all honesty, anyone whose head isn't two feet up their ass has known, or at least suspected this, for years. Since Dickhead Bush and Dick Cheney turned this into a fucking police state. We had heard the whistle-blowers talk about "dark rooms" near the main ATT and VERIZON communications centers. With big wires leading in and out. And we were assured (and still are by Obama) that only those nasty furriners are being watched.
Well fuck me, and fuck us. We're all being watched. Email traffic, the web sites we visit, our credit card transactions, our phone calls. All of it.
What a fucking mess. We let this happen. We are to blame. What a fucking mess.
I don't know. Neither party is our party. It may be time to jump ship.
Seriously.