Executive Order 12333

Dear God! Head for the hills everybody! Uncle Sam is listening in on our phone conversations.
The NSA probably knows all about those 900 numbers you've been calling every Saturday night. They've probably been listening in on the phone calls you made to your therapist and now they know all your dirty little secrets. They know all the details of Uncle Ira's prostate surgery and they may have even written down the recipe to your grandmother's blueberry crumble. Because of this wretched Patriot Act, ordinary citizens will have to start living in fear. If you ever sent money to NARAL or showed up at a College Democrats meeting 30 years ago in order to impress a girl, you can start expecting a midnight knock on your front door any time now. Or maybe it will happen in the form of a dramatic, Gestapo-style take-down in broad daylight on a bustling city street. You just better be looking over your shoulder.

Call Earth.

If the government was going through phone books and randomly picking out Arabic-sounding last names to tap the phone lines of, that would be illegal. If the NSA were wiretapping US persons based on the websites they frequented and political or religious organizations they belonged to, that would be illegal.

Executive Order 12333 was enacted in 1981 precisely because of abuses like this that took place during the Vietnam era. EO 12333 details exactly what intelligence activities can be conducted and how. It also details the protections afforded to US persons. They define US persons in four ways.

1. A US citizen
2. An alien known by the DoD intelligence component considered to be a permanant resident alien
3. An unincorporated association substantially composed of US citizens or permanant resident aliens
4. A corporation incorporation incorporated in the US, unless it is directed and controlled by a foreign government

It does NOT afford these considerations to foreign terrorists who are regularly communicating with individuals inside the US, nor to individuals in the US conducting illegal activities. The NSA hasn't committed any violation of law here. The Patriot Act does not override this. However, the individual who leaked this information and the New York Times who received and published this information are most certainly guilty. The term generally applied to this sort of behavior is sedition. This is simply a desperate election-year attempt to whip up a non-existent abuse of power and make it look like an inevitable conclusion of the Patriot Act.

One wonders what liberals consider treasonous anymore. The rights most liberals seem to be concerned about--the right to kill unborn children, the right to marry a dolphin, the right to pull down their pants in museums and call it art, the right to not be offended by somebody else's public religious observance--are at best ridiculous and at worst horribly twisted. Most don't seem to realize that if Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry have their way in the War on Terror, we'll all be saying "Allah Akbar" and pointing towards Mecca five times a day in short order. Even our most basic rights won't exist anymore and the absurd "rights" that most of them demand and take for granted are usually punishable by death in countries where Islamo-facism is the law of the land.