Rainy days and America get me down.

I learn something new every day. Today's professor is Matthew Aid, as interviewed by Kim Zetter at Salon. Read The NSA is on the line -- all of them.

The controversy over Project Shamrock in 1976 ultimately led Congress to pass the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and other privacy and communication laws designed to prevent commercial companies from working in cahoots with the government to conduct wholesale secret surveillance on their customers. But as stories revealed last week, those safeguards had little effect in preventing at least three telecommunications companies from repeating history.

I knew about the FISA... I didn't realize it stemmed from Project Shamrock. I guess I didn't pay close enough attention at the time. And, as I recall, my introduction to FISA (something like 15 years ago) was by a guy who firmly believed the government is out to get each and everyone of us. Real conspiracy theorist. We'd debate his "theories" endlessly. It was fun and I never took any of it seriously.

I do now.

We should be terrified that Congress has not been doing its job and because all of the checks and balances put in place to prevent this have been deliberately obviated. In order to get this done, the NSA and White House went around all of the checks and balances. I'm convinced that 20 years from now we, as historians, will be looking back at this as one of the darkest eras in American history. And we're just beginning to sort of peel back the first layers of the onion. We're hoping against hope that it's not as bad as I suspect it will be, but reality sets in every time a new article is published and the first thing the Bush administration tries to do is quash the story. It's like the lawsuit brought by EFF [Electronic Frontier Foundation] against AT&T -- the government's first reaction was to try to quash the lawsuit. That ought to be a warning sign that they're on to something.

As usual, me hearts Molly.

I hate to raise such an ugly possibility, but have you considered lunacy as an explanation? Craziness would make a certain amount of sense. I mean, you announce you are going to militarize the Mexican border, but you assure the president of Mexico you are not militarizing the border. You announce you are sending the National Guard, but then you assure everyone it’s not very many soldiers and just for a little while.

Martial law, anyone?