Smile, You're on Candid Camera

It was just last Thursday that we learned that because of the now numerous "previously unseen provisions of the Patriot Act" the government would now be using U2 spyplanes on you and me. Some said that this was an aging platform and couldn't fly all that much and really where was the harm. I said this:

And the Democratically controlled Congress just handed BushCo. even more authority to use the full panoply of U.S. spyware on you and me.

This administration has never met a slippery slope it couldn't immediately make steeper and more slippery. And this was no exception. Now we learn just how quickly BushCo. decided to slide right down the bottom of the slope.

Local and federal agencies are to have vastly expanded access to information gathered from spy satellites in the U.S., the Wall Street Journal reports.

Information from "some of the U.S.'s most powerful intelligence-gathering tools" will soon be at the disposal of a wide array of law enforcement agencies at all levels of government, reports Robert Block in the Journal Wednesday. Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell decided to increase access to the spy data earlier this year and asked Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to facilitate access to the spy data by civilian agencies and law enforcement.

Right to the bottom. Who'd have thought they'd do that?

Oh, and thanks (read f*ck you) again to those Democrats who voted for this.