Civil rights and liberties are da bomb, don’t you think? Yet in a Hobbsian tradeoff, citizens would tend to prefer governmental protection of their lives over absolute assurance that they could joke about bombing buildings and whatnot. It’s a small price to pay, and yet the uberPC crowd show no mercy towards Bush’s acknowledgment that approximately 500 people in the U.S. were “spied” upon after 9/11. (Isn’t the proper word “surveillance”?)

Now check this crap out – chances are that unwittingly, each of us may have had our telephone and internet communications “spied” upon over a period of decades. Following the Cold War, this was standard intelligence practice. Eariler tonight, I was lounging around in my oh-so-satiny babydoll nightshirt and stumbled upon this EU report from 2000. That would fall under the Clinton administration for all the Cindy Sheehan types:

Between 1993 to 1998, the United States conducted sustained diplomatic activity seeking to persuade EU nations and the OECD to adopt their “key recovery” system. Throughout this period, the US government insisted that the purpose of the initiative was to assist law enforcement agencies. Documents obtained for this study suggest that these claims wilfully misrepresented the true intention of US policy. Documents obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act indicate that policymaking was led exclusively by NSA officials, sometimes to the complete exclusion of police or judicial officials.

Emphasis added. Well then. It’s just so much worse when the Bush administration puts enemy combatants under surveillance. Of course, my primary concern is that all that phone sex I had in the 1990′s provided some geeky analyst with some primo masturbation material, but hey, that’s just me.