(Wikimedia)

Buried near the bottom of an explosive Wall Street Journal exposé about the spying capabilities of the NSA is a fascinating tidbit about the breadth of surveillance operations before and during the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics.

For the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, officials say, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and NSA arranged with Qwest Communications International Inc. to use intercept equipment for a period of less than six months around the time of the event. It monitored the content of all email and text communications in the Salt Lake City area.

Huh, makes you wonder whether they knew about the whole pairs figure skating scandal ahead of time.

The Salt Lake City Olympics opened five months after 9/11. Even before those attacks, security was going to be at an all-time high. After that day, measures were ramped up even more. The Secret Service secured areas for events, all foreign visitors were checked on a watch list, F-16s were on constant alert and all law and military agencies operated from the same command center for the first time . Given the climate of fear at the time, spectators likely would have consented to full-body searches to get into events.

Still, the idea that the NSA was intercepting everything, as the WSJ reports, is distressing, if not altogether surprising.