The NYT Feel-Good Story On Data Mining; As Noted Earlier: The NYT Is A Great Newspaper If One Understands The Front Page Is Their Op-Ed Page

Based on the front page of today's New York Times, the story is a non-issue. Their front-page story on the subject is crowded out by other mundane stories, and the story on snooping has a headline suggesting a "feel-good" analysis of how the US uses technology to mine data.

President Obama's name is mentioned once in that long "feel-good" article:

On Friday, President Obama defended the agency’s collection of phone records and other metadata, saying it did not involve listening to conversations or reading the content of e-mails. “Some of the hype we’ve been hearing over the past day or so — nobody has listened to the content of people’s phone calls,” he said. 

But President Bush was mentioned four times, and look at the words that are in proximity, which will help with google searches in the future:

• When President George W. Bush secretly began the N.S.A.’s warrantless wiretapping program in October 2001, to listen in on the international telephone calls and e-mails of American citizens without court approval, the program was accompanied by large-scale data mining operations. 
• Those secret programs prompted a showdown in March 2004 between Bush White House officials and a group of top Justice Department and F.B.I. officials in the hospital room of John Ashcrof ...w ho were willing to go along with warrantless wiretapping argued that the data mining raised greater constitutional concerns.
• ....a firestorm of protest forced the Bush administration to back off...  
• In 2006, the Bush administration established a program ...

OMG, "established a pogrom program..."

I hope folks didn't miss the big story: the president clearly states that the NSA is not listening into conversations of Americans, but in the same breath, simply saying it was doing what Bush was already doing, i.e., "listening in on the international telephone calls and e-mails of American citizens without court approval."

You can't have it both ways. Either they are listening in on American phone calls or they are not; either they are following Bush's precedent or they are not.

President Obama, “Some of the hype we’ve been hearing over the past day or so — nobody has listened to the content of people’s phone calls,” he said. 

Yes, they have. At least according to the NY Times.