Remember when presidential candidate B. Hussein Obama and the rest of the leftists railed against then President George W. Bush for his homeland security policies regarding monitoring overseas telephone calls between suspected terrorism involvees and bank accounts/transactions of same, how heinous they made it all sound, as though the evil conservative POTUS was denying any semblance of privacy to we, the people, singling out little junior’s bank book and listening in on our most intimate telephone conversations?

Well, folks, all those exaggerated responses to logical security policies were mere bagatelles compared to what we now learn Obama’s tame attorney general, Eric Holder, has been up to.

From Wired dot Com:

Attorney General Secretly Granted Gov. Ability to Develop and Store Dossiers on Innocent Americans

In a secret government agreement granted without approval or debate from lawmakers, the U.S. attorney general recently gave the National Counterterrorism Center sweeping new powers to store dossiers on U.S. citizens, even if they are not suspected of a crime, according to a news report.

Earlier this year, Attorney General Eric Holder granted the center the ability to copy entire government databases holding information on flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and other data, and to store it for up to five years, even without suspicion that someone in the database has committed a crime, according to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story.

Whereas previously the law prohibited the center from storing data compilations on U.S. citizens unless they were suspected of terrorist activity or were relevant to an ongoing terrorism investigation, the new powers give the center the ability to not only collect and store vast databases of information but also to trawl through and analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior in order to uncover activity that could launch an investigation.

The changes granted by Holder would also allow databases containing information about U.S. citizens to be shared with foreign governments for their own analysis.

A former senior White House official told the Journal that the new changes were “breathtaking in scope.”

But counterterrorism officials tried to downplay the move by telling the Journal that the changes come with strict guidelines about how the data can be used.

Yeah, yeah, sure they do…

Just like all the other so-called “invasive” Bush policies Obama vowed to do away with while he was running for president (to maintain the votes from his liberal base), but only intensified once he’s become president.

Anyway, read the rest of the article here.