Did NSA surveillance start with Bush?

In a way, yes. But not in the main way, according to Charlie Martin at PJMedia. Martin, a government intelligence consultant in his day job, says:

“Everything we know about the program under Bush says they needed suspicion about an individual, and then collected information about that individual’s calls only. If they saw a connection, they had to make a separate request for that person’s metadata.

“In the Obama administration program, they just collect all the data from everybody in case they want to look at it later.”

So the American surveillance state really is a Leftist creation. No surprise. Who else tries constantly to control what we buy, say, drive and so forth? Martin’s primer on what the NSA is doing—which is here—is worth a read.

UPDATE:  Meanwhile, Wormtongue’s education bureaucracy is snooping on kindergartners, gathering info about their families, supposedly to target the kiddies (like Amazon or Google) for more effective education (i.e. sales) but which could also be used to punish their parents for political transgressions.