Snoopgate and Stuff You Should Read

There's all kinds of goodies out there on Snoopgate. For those of you poor sods that have jobs where they actually make you work or have Christmas shopping, wrapping, and cookie baking left to do, and don't have time to surf the blogosphere with a fine-tooth comb looking for this stuff, and also for Sylvana, because I'm a "a big news source" for her, here's a list of stuff you should read.

Sifu Tweety from The Poor Man thinks that whole bunches of us are being spied on and ponders the technology used to do it.

Patrick from Shakespeare's Sister thinks the White House is using Echelon (which is estimated to intercept up to 3 billion communications every day) to snoop on all of us.

Rob from AmericaBlog reminds us what the 2nd Amendment says and what kind of punishments are written into FISA for naughty, naughty presidents who unconstitutionally spy on people.

And Atrios takes us on a merry little walk down memory lane, where George W. Bush said this in April, 2004:

Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way,
any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it
requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the
way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking
about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our
fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional
guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to
protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.