🚀 go-pugleaf

Americans.

That's all it took to make the massive surveillance "legal".

Of course, massive surveillance means more than just surveillance:

*   Main Justice, by Jim McGee and Brian Duffy, 1996, ISBN 0-684-81135-9
*
*   The FBI had been spying on members of the civil rights movement
*   to discredit Martin Luther King and destroy the civil rights
*   movement, government files showed. There had been burglaries
*   and illegal wiretapping on a grand scale.

Even after FISA legislation, with its strict "minimization" requirement,
CISPES & Co. happened.


Sometimes their suspicion of terrorist/foreign agent activity is laughable.

*   "Above the Law", by David Burnham, ISBN 0-684-80699-1, 1996, short version
*   
*   It was just before April Fool's day, and Virginia Bernard thought the
*   caller was one of her friends pulling a practical joke. Her husband, an
*   ex-IRS official got on the phone, and after a brief discussion was
*   convinced the man really was an FBI agent.
*   
*   Agent Emmett arrived: The seventy-three-year-old part-time teacher was
*   asked: "why did you subscribe to 'Soviet Life' and why did you write to
*   the Soviet embassy?"
*   
*   "I need to clear this up. It's in the interest of national security."
*   
*   With the invocation of the sacred words "national security," one of
*   the most powerful mantras of the long-lived Cold War, Mrs. Bernard's
*   seventy-nine-year-old husband burst out laughing. At any time, it
*   would have been hard to imaging the connection between his wife and
*   the fearsome world of espionage, the arms race and Check Point C