Security Through Obscurity is a Small Peg on which to Hang the Safety of a Nation

Especially our nation. But let's step back. Big Brother has leapt from the pages of fiction onto the headlines. That's not it, either. He was lurking in the shadows since at least 9/01 (you know, when the democracy born on the Fourth of July died and a New Order rose from the ashes?) and, thanks to some "treacherous" news reporters, possibly aided by one or more CIA leaks, was thrown onto Prime Time tv.

Of course, Republican Presidents have pulled shit like this before:

None too pleased about AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth doing the National Security Agency's (NSA) bidding, Arlen Specter says he's going to haul the three telecom companies before the Judiciary Committee for some pointed questions. Deja vu; in 1976, the now-deceased Rep. Bella Abzug did the same thing with three telegraph companies for their similar handmaiden-to-NSA roles. Looking back to those events, we can't help but wonder if there's more history that will repeat itself--will the Bush Administration try, as the Ford Administration did, to extend executive privilege to private industry.

Among the administration execs whose feet were put to the fire but walked away totally unshaken were Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney.

Ars Technica has a characteristically well-done round-up Big Brother's activities from that 1976 run-in to Michael Aids's prediction that we will soon learn of email, text messaging, and cell phone snooping. (We ran out of hyphens here in the Ocean, or we'd cram more in there.) Read it.