Well, that was another fantastic waste of time. Man, I want us to be looking into this, but so far, it's just fruitless.

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the terrorist surveillance program "has been subject to extensive oversight both in the executive branch and in Congress from the time of its inception."

Somehow I get the sense they weren't taking the investigation seriously if their standpoint was that everything was already OK.

Roehrkasse noted the OPR's mission is not to investigate possible wrongdoing in other agencies, but to determine if Justice Department lawyers violated any ethical rules.

Wait, what? Then what the fuck was the point of this anyway? Other than a token effort just to distract people, of course. And I guess that answers my question.

Separately, the Justice Department sought last month to dismiss a federal lawsuit accusing the telephone company AT&T of colluding with the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program.

The lawsuit, brought by an Internet privacy group, does not name the government as a defendant, but the Department of Justice has sought to quash the lawsuit, saying it threatens to expose government and military secrets.

Yeah, the Justice Department's stance on all of this is pretty clear. I hate to have to go Star Trek on the situation, but Captain Picard's words are very apropos: "A matter of internal security: the age-old cry of the oppressor."

And if you haven't heard about AT&T's involvement in all this (and as I just discovered, most of the other major telecoms as well), that's pretty fucked up, too. The lengths that these people will go to in order to "protect" us is astounding, and we probably don't even know the half of it yet.