In a Followup to Greg Palast's Piece, Here's One from the NY Daily News

Sound familiar AND scary? It should:

Fonegate part of fed spying

WASHINGTON - The federal government's massive grab of nearly all the nation's phone records was just a small part of a vast array of official "data mining" projects whose legality has come into question.

In two reports since 2004, the Government Accountability Office said 52 of the 128 government agencies surveyed had either carried out or planned such projects - resulting in 199 separate efforts to collect information.

Five of the agencies - including the FBI, State Department and Internal Revenue Service - failed to comply with federal privacy and communications safeguards in their efforts to track terrorists and catch criminals, the GAO said.

The failures "increased the risk that personal information could be improperly exposed or altered," the GAO reports said of the searches for patterns, trends and relationships in huge databases.

The survey by the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, did not include the National Security Agency's collection of hundreds of millions of phone records going back nearly five years.
In his weekly radio address yesterday, President Bush again defended the NSA project without confirming its existence.

"The privacy of all Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities," Bush said. "We are not trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans."

But a Newsweek poll released yesterday found 53% of Americans think the NSA's surveillance "goes too far in invading people's privacy," while 41% saw it as a necessary tool to combat terrorism. That contrasts sharply with an ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted Thursday - the day the snooping news broke in USA Today - in which two-thirds of those polled said the actions were acceptable.