Obama's 'Black Widow'

From Wendy McElroy via Billy Beck comes this essential article from the Village Voice's long-time free speech maven Nat Hentoff.

This excerpt will show you why you need to read 'em all:

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Barack Obama will be in charge of the biggest domestic and international spying operation in history. Its prime engine is the National Security Agency (NSA)—located and guarded at Fort Meade, Maryland, about 10 miles northeast of Washington, D.C. A brief glimpse of its ever-expanding capacity was provided on October 26 by The Baltimore Sun's national security correspondent, David Wood: "The NSA's colossal Cray supercomputer, code-named the 'Black Widow,' scans millions of domestic and international phone calls and e-mails every hour. . . . The Black Widow, performing hundreds of trillions of calculations per second, searches through and reassembles key words and patterns, across many languages."
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Consider getting this book as reviewed by Wood as well.

Despite my near-bottomless cynicism, the standard japes about "paranoia" seem a little out of key.

Alea iacta est.