Confirmation that you are being spied on a variety of ways you hadn't yet considered. I've almost lost my capacity for outrage. Not because I'm not offended to my core, but because the Congress isn't.
It's the Congress, not the President, that is supposed to represent the people in our Democratic Republic. They don't.
Prediction: A handful of Democratic leadership will come out swinging. They will promise action. They will say they've heard the voice of the people. Then they will be challenged by the President, who will say "boo!".
The Congress (especially Democrats) will tuck their tails between their legs and scurry off to hide, then pass a bill that not only legalizes the actions they spoke out against, but grants even more powers and removes any existing oversight.
We the people will not do a god-damned thing about it, but if we gave a damn about the freedoms we used to have, we would be taking to the streets.
From Salon.com: America under surveillance
The NGA's role in Hurricane Katrina has received little attention outside of a few military and space industry publications. But the agency's close working relationship with the NSA -- whose powers to spy domestically were just expanded with new legislation from Congress -- raises the distinct possibility that the U.S. government could be doing far more than secretly listening in on phone calls as it targets and tracks individuals inside the United States. With the additional capabilities of the NGA and the use of other cutting-edge technologies, the government could also conceivably be following the movements of those individuals minute by minute, watching a person depart from a mosque in, say, Lodi, Calif., or drive a car from Chicago to Detroit. [...]
Prior to Katrina, the NGA had been used sporadically during domestic crises. Its first baptism of fire came after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when the agency collected imagery to help in the recovery efforts at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But the storm of 2005 triggered NGA activity on a scale never before seen inside the borders of the United States. "Hurricane Katrina changed everything with what we do with disasters," John Goolgasian, the director of the NGA's Office of Americas, told Salon. In New York after 9/11, the NGA had only a handful of people on the ground, but "with Katrina, we put a lot of people down in the theater," he said, using a term usually reserved for overseas military battlegrounds. The agency now deploys its staff on a regular basis to hurricane zones and also provides assistance to law enforcement agencies during events such as the Super Bowl, the baseball All-Star Game and political conventions.
On one level, the engagement of the NGA and the U-2 flights over the Gulf Coast during Katrina were commendable efforts to use America's vast surveillance powers for the safety and support of its citizens. But at the same time, the incident apparently marked the first time in history that U.S. intelligence agencies created to spy on foreign countries were deployed to collect extensive information on the U.S. "homeland." Their role during Katrina is just one aspect of an enormous domestic surveillance infrastructure put in place by the Bush administration ever since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks sparked a radical restructuring and expansion of America's intelligence system. Although the full scope of domestic surveillance under Bush remains elusive, we now know from press accounts, lawsuits, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other top Bush officials' descriptions and denials that the NSA has been involved in multiple domestic surveillance programs -- in apparent violation of federal law -- including spying on Americans' telecommunications and Internet traffic, as well as data mining.
(This was originally posted @ Shadow-Media.org)