Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Life Imitating Bourne?

"The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device..."


This from a Wired article describing in some detail the extent and nature of the wire-tapping beast. It reads an awful lot like the technical part of the latest Bourne movie, Ultimatum. A little bit of life imitating the movies, it seems to me.

I only hope that the FBI isn't imitating the nasty, vindictive, self-serving not to mention incompetent meanies who made up the G-Men-types in the Bourne movies. I know I'm way behind the cutting-edge conspiracy theorists who are convinced the gummint is spying on them, and I really do want to give "us" a fighting chance in the war against civilian terrorists. But I admit to being just a little uncomfortable with the ease with which a wiretap can take place. We're in the "few taps of a keyboard" era of spying. But spies as ever are subject to boredom. And boredom is the mother of all sorts of nonsense.

2 comments:

UserDifficulty said...

Wasn't the wire-tapping movement revoked by congress? I realize that doesn't mean the gummint won't still do it, but I thought that snake's head was cut off.

Lutheran Lucciola said...

The older I get, the less I trust my goobermint.

Nice blog, by the way. Your title caught my eye;-) (see my new blog)