President Bush is a criminal; oops, he might have the NSA tracking my keystrokes

President Bush uses the National Security Agency to spy on Americans ( detailed here) — without warrants, no less — and is clearly a criminal.

Where’s this rubber hit the road with extra burnout for me?

Maybe I was the one being spied on.

I’m a skeptic about life in general and things like conspiracy theories in general, hence the name of my blog.

But this is different.

I participated in antiwar rallies in two cities in 2003 — Dallas, where I live, in February, and Los Angeles, in the week of the invasion, in March while on vacation.

There’s strike one against me.

I may (or may not) have e-mailed John Bolton in his position as Undersecretary of State, via an action alert by the ACLU or some other organization to which I belong. If I did, there’s strike two.

In 1991, after Lithuania declared its independence from the disnintegrating Soviet Union the year before, I wrote a strong letter to President George H.W. Bush, chiding him for the United States not being the first, or even the second, country to officially recognize Lithuania. In that letter, I even went so far as to call him a “son of a bitch.” (True, we had never officially recognized the 1940 Soviet takeover, but Bush still was quite tardy on officially recognizing the country’s de facto, not de jure, independence.)

Who knows what federal intelligence files copies of that letter may still occupy? If they’re still out there, that’s a possible strike three.

So, in other words, I may have been spied upon.

And I'm pissed off.

I agree with Steve Clemons. Make this information public.

On the “relax” side, I haven’t made any international phone calls other than to Parks Canada for information about Banff; ditto on international e-mails, and I haven’t received anything internationally except Nigerian 419 spam.

Small comfort.

Update:
There’s a bit of irony here, too.

I recently ordered, via interlibrary loan (oops, that damned Patriot Act) The Puzzle Palace, about the history and workings of the NSA, and it arrived at my library Thursday.

From the Amazon review:

Bamford backs his serious historical and technical material (this is a carefully researched work of nonfiction) with warnings about how easily the NSA's technology could work against the democracies of the world. Bamford quotes U.S. Senator Frank Church: "If this government ever became a tyranny ... the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government ... is within the reach of the government to know." This is scary stuff.

A poster on Kos reminded me of the rest of the Church quote:

“I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency [NSA] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”