Josh Marshall quotes the Baltimore Sun:

The National Security Agency developed a pilot program in the late 1990s that would have enabled it to gather and analyze massive amounts of communications data without running afoul of privacy laws. …

The shelved program …

• Used more sophisticated methods of sorting through massive phone and e-mail data to identify suspect communications.

• Identified U.S. phone numbers and other communications data and encrypted them to ensure caller privacy.

• Employed an automated auditing system to monitor how analysts handled the information, in order to prevent misuse and improve efficiency.

• Analyzed the data to identify relationships between callers and chronicle their contacts. Only when evidence of a potential threat had been developed would analysts be able to request decryption of the records.

I felt like crap today, and yesterday got sabotaged when OG&E rolled up without warning and said, "Oh, we're about to turn off your electricity for 'a while.'" I went to go pick up a prescription rather than sit at a desk with no power, except the insurance company randomly decided to make my doctor "pre-authorize" the prescription again, for the 4th time in 14 months, which meant an extra fee and that my refill wasn't ready even though I was out of the medicine. So I went to see my folks instead and take them some stuff.

And on the way, I was thinking, "Well, geez, of course they could do this with privacy if they wanted to. All they have to do is mix about 2048 bits of random data with each US phone number and use a suitable one-way algorithm to turn that into a 128-bit UUID or something. Then if the government actually wants to data mine the entire phone system looking for patterns, they can do it without knowing anyone's phone number.

If they find something suspicious, like a network of calls to a known terrorist number outside the US (where there may not be an expectation of US privacy), they can subpoena the telco for the actual phone number behind the UUID that let them do the analysis. The same could work for E-mail traffic, Usenet posting, whatever: we easily have the technology to convert that stuff to non-trivially-decryptable UUIDs that let people analyze it all they want without revealing anything protected by privacy laws. (Well, I don't, but I presume someone would come up with a script for logs for all the popular servers.)

I thought, "Dang, if I can think of this, they had to have thought of it. These people aren't stoopid." As Josh points out - no, they're not. They had all this and more figured out and working a decade ago, but the current administration threw it out because they don't believe they have to obey the law. It's like the entire international wiretapping thing: getting the warrants from the FISA court would have been all but trivial, since they do it thousands of times per year and never get turned down (15 times in 30 years counts as never). There was no reason to break the law, except for an irresistible urge to do it for the sake of raw power.

By the way, when I was at my folks' place, they had a couple of the national network newscasts on the tube. On these shows, Republicans advanced all of the following positions, simultaneously:

1. Illegal immigrants must never be granted a "path to citizenship" because their presence in this country is illegal. It breaks the law. They must be taught to respect "the rule of law" and not be rewarded for breaking the law. The ends do not justify the means.

2. Reporters who may have revealed details of illegal, secret CIA prisons where the US sends prisoners for interrogations forbidden by US law, or revealed details of secret domestic wiretapping programs. have damaged national security and must be prosecuted as leakers. The ends do not justify the means.

3. It doesn't matter if the Bush administration broke the law or not over secret prisons or domestic spying because national security was involved. The ends justify the means.

Seriously, it's no wonder my head was throbbing all day after listening to Republicans say that illegal aliens - people who aren't even US citizens - have to be held accountable to every single letter of the law, but the President of the United States is above the law. All of them who hold these completely laughably inconsistent positions, no matter what party or affiliation they boast, should be laughed out of the public sphere for good. Throw the bums out!