Today, the New York Times is running an article concerning the extreme security measures in place for judges ruling on lawsuits related to the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program. These are no ordinary judges, but Federal Appeals judges confirmed by the Senate. One of the judges on the panel, Garr M. King, likened the procedures to something out of Alice in Wonderland.

Plaintiffs have no access to papers filed by the government or classified arguments in the case, which means just about everything. ("Your motion is denied." --On what grounds? "I can't say." --What arguments were used to oppose our motion? "I can't say."). Even zanier, the government is seeking to inspect and scrub the computers which the plaintiffs have used to write their briefs. Judges opinions and rulings are not to be made public, shared with the plaintiffs, and are to be stored in a secure location under custody of the defense (DOJ). There is no assurance that those opinions won't be changed other than the good word of the Bush Administration.

Why? There is only speculation at this point, but I would suggest that the whole dirty scheme can be traced back to John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness program--designed to build a massive database covering every American and virually everything that they do. I would further suggest that the NSA program (warrantless recording of calls) cannot be integrated into the existing FISA structure because PEOPLE are not listening in to the conversations--only computers--parsing for key words, vocal patterns (e.g., young males with Middle Eastern accents), etc. etc.

Finally, I would suggest that the NSA is fully integrated with the government's efforts, documented last year by the Washington Post, to trace the phone calls of all Americans (which numbers call which other numbers) and the efforts to collect data on all financial transactions.

In short, I believe TIA is in full operation at this point and Orwell's 1984 has finally arrived. Fortunately, my government is protecting me from having this knowledge confirmed. And this time, the government is right. The President said, "They attack us because they hate our freedom." If the truth got out, it would help our enemies. They would be thrilled that they had won the war on terror and succeeded in their efforts to eliminate our freedom.