With the President’s approval, the National Security Agency (NSA) has been spying on American citizens without oversight. They’ve been doing it since 2002, but Bush has just admitted it. (You know, I really didn’t believe the story that came out a few days ago about Bush saying to his advisors that the Constitution is “just a goddamned piece of paper,” but now I’m starting to wonder if there might be some truth to it.)

I guess from now on we should all just assume that we’re being watched all of the time… Did you see in today’s news that a student at U-Mass was visited at home by federal agents after requesting an inter-library loan of Chairman Mao’s little red book? That’s not really the kind of thing you’d expect from a free society, is it?

Of course Cheney says that if Clinton had allowed warrantless surveillance 9/11 never would have happened. As the folks at Think Progress point out, however, that’s absolute bullshit. Here’s a blurb from their post on the subject:

The NSA “already had the capacity to read your mail and your e-mail and listen to your telephone conversations. All it had to do was obtain a warrant from a special court created for this purpose. The burden of proof for obtaining a warrant was relaxed a bit after 9/11, but even before the attacks the court hardly ever rejected requests.” Indeed, from 1979 to 2002, the FISA court issued 15,264 surveillance warrants. Not a single warrant application was rejected.

But we needed to make it easier… eliminating any written documentation, as well as oversight.

I guess maybe we should just be happy that we aren’t being tortured… at least not on U.S. soil.

(note: This post was brought to you courtesy of the brand new They Might Be Giants podcast.)