Bush secretly expanded spying in U.S. , officials say-President authorized National Security Agency to eavesdrop without court-approved warrants

From the Spys Like Us File: Bush Authorized Widespread Eavsdropping on International Calls.


This is news, but I'm not sure why. It has been my understanding for years that the NSA routinely monitored large quantities of international calls; and in fact, after satellites, that's where the biggest part of its budget goes. It was widely reported around 9/11 that the NSA used advanced voice recognition technology to have computers listen to certain words or phrases, and when there was a match, the call would get human attention.

Bush secretly expanded spying in U.S. , officials say-President authorized National Security Agency to eavesdrop without court-approved warrants

Wouldn't you know it, just now, our favorite superhero, the Googleteer(tm) flew in through the window and performed this search:

N.S.A. "voice recognition" monitoring

and it returned 14,000 hits.

Many of the hits reference "The Echelon Project." I have a hunch that much of what's been written about the Echelon project is untrue, but since nobody has deemed it necessary to give me a guided tour of top secret intelligence operations, I'll leave it for others to debate. Personally, I love the sound of "Project Echelon", it sounds like it comes right out of the X-Files.