"It appears the "terrorist surveillance program" has undergone a bit of mission creep. And it's not Ross who needs a bunch of disposable cellphones -- Big Brother already knows who he is -- but his sources." ...... "The creation of the Plumbers Unit (officially: the White House Special Investigations Unit) was just one of a series of semi-legal or flat-out illegal steps taken by the Nixon cabal to investigate leaks of classified information. Others included the wiretapping of 11 of Henry Kissinger's top aides and four of their suspected journalistic contacts, and tapping the phone of Joseph Kraft -- one of the celebrity columnists of the day. "The original goal -- or at least, the stated goal -- of these efforts was to plug leaks. But the program quickly metastasized into an all-purpose domestic spying/political dirty tricks operation, beginning with the burglery of Ellberg's psychiatrist's office in an effort to find dirt that could be used to blackmail and/or discredit him. The entire operation was eventually transferred to CREEP (Nixon's 1972 reelection committee), where it generated an increasingly bizarre array of schemes -- like G. Gordon Liddy's idea of luring delegates to the 1972 Democratic convention onto offshore prostitution barges, again for blackmail purposes. The plan failed, however, after the Kennedy family insisted on a group discount. ......" An interesting read. http://billmon.org/archives/002446.html