Warrantless wiretaping by telcos, back door access to a unnamed cellular network and warrantless surveillance of first class mail all done by the lords of fear in the Bush world. What will be next? Maybe a door to door search of every citizen of what used to be America. How many of the articles of the Bill of Rights will Congress allow to be usurped?

Babak Pasdar revealed the back door access to a wireless carrier that he hasn't named. Pasdar stated in an interview with Wired.

A U.S. government office in Quantico, Virginia, has direct, high-speed access to a major wireless carrier's systems, exposing customers' voice calls, data packets and physical movements to uncontrolled surveillance, according to a computer security consultant who says he worked for the carrier in late 2003.

"What I thought was alarming is how this carrier ended up essentially allowing a third party outside their organization to have unfettered access to their environment," Babak Pasdar, now CEO of New York-based Bat Blue told Threat Level. "I wanted to put some access controls around it; they vehemently denied it. And when I wanted to put some logging around it, they denied that."

Pasdar won't name the wireless carrier in question, but his claims are nearly identical to unsourced allegations made in a federal lawsuit filed in 2006 against four phone companies and the U.S. government for alleged privacy violations. That suit names Verizon Wireless as the culprit.

Pasdar has executed a seven-page affidavit for the nonprofit Government Accountability Project in Washington, which on Tuesday began circulating the document (.pdf), along with talking points (.doc), to congressional staffers hashing out a Republican proposal to grant retroactive legal immunity to phone companies who cooperated in the warrantless wiretapping of Americans.

Our friendly neighborhood spies didn't forget about the old fashioned ways of communication either. According to a Raw Story article the US Postal Service has been enabling the covert surveillance of our mail as well.

Since 1998, the inspector has approved more than 97% of requests during criminal inquiries, new documents show. According to USA Today, which filed the request, "In 2004, 2005 and 2006, the most recent year provided, officials granted at least 99.5% of requests."

"The idea of the government tracking that amount of mail is quite alarming," Director of the American Civil Liberties Union's national security project Jameel Jaffer told the paper. "When you realize that (the figure) does not include national security matters, the numbers are even more alarming."

I don't know who to trust but I damn sure know who I don't trust. Imagine how much we will never know if the House passes a retroactive immunity PAA. We have got to continue to pressure our Reps to leave out any immunity or secret FISA court reviews. I for one want to know how much was done and how deeply we were abused.