Echelon II

AP: President Bush said Saturday he has no intention of stopping his personal authorizations of a post-Sept. 11 secret eavesdropping program in the U.S..."

This is odd because long before 9/11, the NSA already spied on communication by US citizens, yes during Clinton too, as part of an agreement with several other countries (among them UK and NZ if I recall correctly) involved in the Echelon program.

They way it works is that these partner countries spy on communications of ordinary US citizens, and then share the results with our government. This gets around the fact that it is illegal for our government to spy on US citizens without a warrant.

So why does Bush need a redundant authorization to collect what he's already getting? I suspect that the motivation is twofold:

(1) It's about time we spied on our own citizens directly.

(2) Leftists, liberals, and Democrats seem a lot like terrorists, so let's keep tabs on them, and run a few ops when necessary.