Frontline Special On Domestic Spying

This Tuesday Night Frontline on PBS is going to have a special called Spying on the Home Front. It is to air at 9 PM EST.

Because if takes so long to make these documentaries Mr. C hasfound that Frontline can sometimes be a little behind the news. Timeliness aside, Frontline makes some of the best documentaries on TV today.

A review of the show can be found by Glenn Greenwald on Salon.com called PBS’s “Frontline: Spying on the Home Front”.

Of it Greenwald says “Like the Bill Moyers documentary on the pre-Iraq press failures, the program does not really contain blockbuster new revelations that are unknown to those who have been attentive to these matters, but is nonetheless very much worth watching because it powerfully dramatizes the severity of privacy erosion at the hands of a federal government operating largely in the dark.”

Sounds good to Mr. C. This is the issue that got Mr. C involved in “sticking it to the man” in the first place. If he can’t watch it he will record it. Also Mr. C will post the link to the show after it is broadcast.

From the Frontline website:

Spying on the Home Front

(60 minutes) FRONTLINE addresses an issue of major consequence for all Americans: Is the Bush administration’s domestic war on terrorism jeopardizing our civil liberties? Reporter Hedrick Smith presents new material on how the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program works and examines clashing viewpoints on whether the president has violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and infringed on constitutional protections. In another dramatic story, the program shows how the FBI vacuumed up records on 250,000 ordinary Americans who chose Las Vegas as the destination for their Christmas-New Year’s holiday, and the subsequent revelation that the FBI has misused National Security Letters to gather information. Probing such projects as Total Information Awareness, and its little known successors, Smith discloses that even former government intelligence officials now worry that the combination of new security threats, advances in communications technologies, and radical interpretations of presidential authority may be threatening the privacy of Americans. (read the press release)