Sadly, this will surprise no one, but intelligence historian Matthew Aid predicts today on Salon.com that the next round of revelations on the warrantless domestic spying issue will reveal the NSA has been monitoring the public Internet, and that the Telecom firms have been complicit in helping them.

“I’ll tell you where this story probably will go next. Notice the USA Today article doesn’t mention whether the Internet service providers or cellphone providers or companies operating transatlantic cables like Global Crossing cooperated with the NSA. That’s the next round of revelations. The real vulnerabilities for the NSA are the companies. Sooner or later one of these companies, fearing the inevitable lawsuit from the ACLU, is going to admit what it did, and the whole thing is going to come tumbling down. If you want some historical perspective look at Operation Shamrock, which collapsed in 1975 because [Rep.] Bella Abzug [D-NY] subpoenaed the heads of Western Union and the other telecommunications giants and put them in witness chairs, and they all admitted that they had cooperated with the NSA for the better part of 40 years by supplying cables and telegrams.

This is consistent with reports from last month that AT&T is shunting all internet traffic at a switch in San Francisco to a secret room controlled by the NSA in violation of federal and state law.

Oh, and the Feds are also spying on journalists. If it smells like Nixon…

Meanwhile, the president will show us tonight what a tough guy he is by militarizing our southern border. That’s sure to drive up those poll numbers.