The Real Story Behind LOVEINT

The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that NSA officials have on multiple occassions used its surveillance grid to spy on an agent's love interests. The use of "intelligence" resources is well known enough to have garnered its own spycraft "operational code": LOVEINT.

The story has spawned quite a handful of humorous posts in the blogosphere, which has become the focus of the mainstream media coverage.

What the mainstream media misses, however, is the ominous reality: The scope of the domestic surveillance grid is so comprehensive that the most intimate communications of every person in the U.S. is captured.

One need not be a terrorist, suspected terrorist or even person of law enforcement interest.

Yes, it is true that any random pickup an NSA agent may meet in a bar can be spied on.

The real story is that this is because every single person in every bar, in every restaurant, in every shopping mall, in the United States is having their most intimate communications swept up, scanned, warehoused, and stored for data mining purposes. 

The U.S. Government has, without debate and covertly, surrounded us all with a massive surveillance grid that warehouses everything within its reach about each and every one of us.