Everybody knows the ultra-secretive NSA was snooping.
The program was called Stellarwind. The snooping of Stellarwind has always been falsely described
as listening in. In fact it was more like reading the addresses and
return addresses on envelopes, something which was routinely done without a
warrant back in the days of snail mail. The NSA tracked what phone
originated each call and what phone was dialed, and that's all. No phone
conversations were listened to without a warrant, at least under
Stellarwind. Based on who called who, Stellarwind constructed a pattern
of groups of people who were in contact with each other. Whether that was
a big enough threat to privacy for it to be cancelled is a question for
the reader. My personal opinion is that it's a very close call. I
would feel better about allowing the NSA to do it if Lois Lerner had not
deployed IRS powers against President Obama's political enemies. I still
think it's probably worth doing despite the risk of abuse.
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