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Point of clarification: Wiretaps or surveillance?

Tue, 12/20/2005 - 8:32pm — lambert

Since I've been absent from the fray for almost 24 hours:

Point of clarification before I return to my sick bed with the second volume of His Dark Materials--

In King George's latest in a long train of abuses and usurpations, is it Echelon surveillance that's at issue, or Echelon wiretapping?

Atrios seems to be pounding on wiretapping, but I'm wondering if that's because it's especially easy to catch Bush lying on that one.

However, Echelon can monitor a lot more than voice, which is what wiretapping does. IP traffic ("the internet"), for example.

UPDATE Here's an Echelon primer from WaPo; and here's Wikipedia. Oddly, we run into a numerical discrepancy right away. WaPo says 650 million intercepts a day; WikiPedia over 3 billion.

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