-By Warner Todd Huston
New reports have emerged showing that employees of the National Security Agency have misused their power to spy on American’s communication by keeping tabs on their own girlfriends, boyfriends, family members and neighbors, snooping into what they were doing in their daily lives.
The practice was so blatant that NSA employees had even coined a term for this type of spying: “Love-int.” This stands for “love intelligence,” as in information on loved ones.
It was recently disclosed that the NSA had broken privacy rules on nearly 3,000 occasions over just a one-year period, so imagine how many times they’ve abused their powers over the 10 years they’ve been building these capabilities!
There can be no better example than this of the old axiom, “absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Of course, the jackbooted thugs…er, chiefs of intelligence at NSA promise that they are taking steps to make sure these sort of things don’t happen and if they do are immediately stopped.
Naturally, John DeLong, NSA chief compliance officer, is apologetic but insists that there have only been “a couple” of willful violations here and there.3.000 is “a couple” in NSA speak, apparently.
“When we make mistakes, we detect, we correct and we report,” DeLong insisted.
Even more reassuring, I’m sure, the NSA issued a statement saying: “NSA has zero tolerance for willful violations of the agency’s authorities” and responds “as appropriate.”
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, MrConservative.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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