"Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence"
Donald Rumsfeld

As I had said earlier in the pieces regarding this surveillance program and has been borne out in every detail during it's entire history, phone call surveillance is a crimson red and monstrous herring. Talk about phone conversations is absolutely irrelevant. The real story, the program which this administration and AT&T/Verizon/Sprint etc. want to keep muffled, is the Internet Surveillance program. Let me explain again in very simple terms.

This is a phone.

When you call somebody long distance from this little contraption, your voice, as an audible SOUND, is carried from the handset through several switches and more often than not, will be converted into NUMBERS that looks like this.

100100011110100100011110101101001011011

At the point your call reaches the big backbone that AT&T or (insert favorite telco here). Those numbers join billions of other promiscuous numbers over a fiber about this wide ||.

Along with those numbers that represent phonecalls are numbers that represent email, numbers that represent web browsing, numbers that represent porn, numbers that represent poems, numbers that represent other numbers. Numbers that represent corporate data which represent your medical data, your financial data going across these backbones. NUMBERS PEOPLE. NUMBERS, NUMBERS, NUMBERS

Now let me "speak" slowly and clearly. NUMBERS ARE NOT SOUNDS. I repeat. NUMBERS ARE NOT SOUNDS. This was understood pretty well by our ancestors, some time before the Greeks, but apparently in this era of mass insanity, those particular brain cells concerned with logic and clear thinking are somehow missing. From this seemingly small and self-evident fact comes an important, vitally important message:

99% of the time, politicians, both Democrat and Republican, and all of corporate media and polling firms will be using the words "WIRETAP", "LISTENING ON CONVERSATIONS" or some reference to audible communications. When anybody says "WIRETAP", BY LAW, they are not talking about looking at these NUMBERS going across AT&Ts backbone network. Nobody can hook a "WIRETAP" to a fiber. It is impossible. When anybody uses the word "WIRETAP" they ARE NOT talking about the current program. When anybody uses the phrase "COLLECTING NUMBERS" or the word "PEN REGISTER", they ARE talking about this program.

Senator Sessions and the rest of Republican cloaking device liberally sprinkled these words and others in their first attempt Thursday before the Committee on the Judiciary to put forth a legal claim that will be used continuously in the future by this Executive Branch and it's Congress and presented as justification to the Judicial Branch. Their frame will be:

There is no wiretapping or listening or datamining of conversations. We are collecting numbers, using pen trap registers, according to law. We are not invading privacy, because there is no 'reasonable expectation of privacy' for numbers on AT&T's network. That's the law.

And insofar as we allow these people to use these words and we in turn use them uncritically, we will ignore the real threat to our Fourth Amendment.

Now read the posts below for the detail. CorrenteWire, the original host of edited versions of these pieces, seems to be down.