At least partially to blame.
I note that ‘07 was the year congress was subsumed by the dims. How much of the funding and programs came from the dims in charge of things there? Bush did nothing to fight this stuff, and in fact was pushing for much more heavier stuff than what was passed in 2007 and what Obama wanted.
Remember it was the Bush administration that was pushing the
Total Information Awareness stuff, where they would create a massive database on all Americans, that would track phone calls, texts, emails, web traffic, magazine subscriptions, bills, banking, gun ownership, ammo purchases, etc. and basically try to figure out if somebody was going to do something, as well as create the ability to see who we associate with.
Handy for fighting terrorists? You betcha. Also handy for a police state.
And the Bush administration fully embraced and supported the PATRIOT Act (how disgusting that they used a word like "PATRIOT").
It's very possible the Obama administration tried to revive the Bush administration's TIA project, but even if they didn't, TIA lived on in bits and pieces (after supposedly being defunded), and what we are seeing with this data mining was a cornerstone of the original TIA.
If I have the kind of power that Bush and Obama had, even if I can't read the contents of your phone calls/VOIP activity/emails, if I can at least see you are making them and where they are being made from and to, I can easily build up a database of who you are friends with and/or related to, where you travel to, who you associate with. If I can see all of that plus your web traffic, over a year or two I can figure out your personality, or at least most of your interests.
It's actually quite chilling, especially if you try and link it in with the IRS stuff that's going on.
I’m not absolving Bush by any means.
His dad was pretty creepy too.
It all makes me wonder what sort of machinations are going on within the elite circle they all fly in.