U.S. Outlines N.S.A.'s Culling of Data for All Domestic Calls

New York Times ^ | 7/31/13 | Charlie Savage

[Nachum]

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Wednesday released formerly classified documents outlining a once-secret program of the National Security Agency that is collecting records of all domestic phone calls in the United States, as top officials testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. As the hearing began, The Guardian newspaper published another document from the archives of Top Secret surveillance matters leaked to it by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden. It was a 32-page presentation describing the N.S.A.´s XKeyscore program, by which N.S.A. analysts can mine vast databases of phone and Internet information the agency has vacuumed up.

[madison10]

Same here. Only item on list is the internet. There is an upside to being too broke to afford technology/newest gadget. LOL

[uncommonsense]

From the article:

"Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images.

Together, the two programs show that postal mail is subject to the same kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency has given to telephone calls and e-mail."

Heck no, we don't live in a police state./sarc

This is why guberment employees don't care what the masses think or say. They have every piece of mail tracked, have a massive data warehouse of aggregated personal info (their "consumer protection" database), have every phone call captured, every email, text message, social media post, and browsing history - you name it, they have it (hi Mr. Clapper).

They don't respect the power of common people, unless the common folks organize in mass like the Tea Party. That's been the ONLY real threat to their grip on absolute power, but once ObamaCare kicks in, nothing will stop these thugs.