How are we supposed to SPY on you if we have to Implement Safeguards?

We had the technology to do phone analysis without invading privacy but after 9/11 this was rejected...apparently for no other purpose than to allow spying on YOU a fuck load easier.

What "right to privacy"? As the cuddly Judge Bork would say.

From the Baltimore Sun:

The National Security Agency developed a pilot program in the late 1990s that would have enabled it to gather and analyze massive amounts of communications data without running afoul of privacy laws. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, it shelved the project -- not because it failed to work -- but because of bureaucratic infighting and a sudden White House expansion of the agency's surveillance powers, according to several intelligence officials.

The agency opted instead to adopt only one component of the program, which produced a far less capable and rigorous program. It remains the backbone of the NSA's warrantless surveillance efforts, tracking domestic and overseas communications from a vast databank of information, and monitoring selected calls...

...Sources say the NSA's existing system for data-sorting has produced a database clogged with corrupted and useless information.

The mass collection of relatively unsorted data, combined with system flaws that sources say erroneously flag people as suspect, has produced numerous false leads, draining analyst resources, according to two intelligence officials. FBI agents have complained in published reports in The New York Times that NSA leads have resulted in numerous dead ends.

The privacy protections offered by ThinThread were also abandoned in the post-Sept. 11 push by the president for a faster response to terrorism.

Once President Bush gave the go-ahead for the NSA to secretly gather and analyze domestic phone records -- an authorization that carried no stipulations about identity protection -- agency officials regarded the encryption as an unnecessary step and rejected it, according to two intelligence officials knowledgeable about ThinThread and the warrantless surveillance programs.

"They basically just disabled the [privacy] safeguards," said one intelligence official.

Another, a former top intelligence official, said that without a privacy requirement, "there was no reason to go back to something that was perhaps more difficult to implement."

However two officials familiar with the program said the encryption feature would have been simple to implement. One said the time required would have involved minutes, not hours.

Encryption would have required analysts to be more disciplined in their investigations, however, by forcing them to gather what a court would consider sufficient information to indicate possible terrorist activity before decryption could be authorized.

In short they went with a system that is LESS effective at detecting terrorist subjects, and LESS concerned with legal protections, but MORE effective at spying on YOU!

Congratulations Dear Leader you have done it again!