Spying on Americans, Round 2

First it was our international calls under attack, now it's our domestic calls.  Yesterday, USA Today (NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls) reported that the NSA has been collecting call records of many Americans since 9/11.  If you are a customer of AT&T (including SBC), BellSouth (likely including Cingular), or Verizon, the government knows about every call you've made and recieved, on both land lines and cells. Kudos to Qwest as they are the largest telecom that did not comply.  Status of GTE, Sprint/Nextel, small carriers, and cable companies is undisclosed.

It is claimed that the information gathered is going towards detecting terrorism, and that the NSA is not collecting personal information, other than call logs.  No names, addresses, social security numbers, or other personal indentifiers are being handed over by the telecoms, but the NSA can extract this information from other sources.  Are they extracting this information?  Unclear, and likely it will never be fully clear how far this program goes.  Face it, they admited to tapping international calls, and are not denying domestic call log gathering, it's likely that thier database is far more extensive than is known now.

What really gets me is Bush's response yesterday.  (AP via Yahoo! News -- Text: Bush's Comments on NSA Activities)  Basically he didn't address anything important, yeah, big shock.  Here's the meat and potatoes of his announcement, with my commentary.  "First, our international activities strictly target al-Qaida and their known affiliates. Al-Qaida is our enemy, and we want to know their plans."  Why discuss the international activites, when it's the domestic activites at stake?  This affects over 200 million customers, which is a majority of the people in the United States.  Looks like we are all terrorists.  But yeah, Al-Qaida is our enemy, and always has been our enemy, how silly of me, here's my call records, and while you're at it here's my internet history, and the TV channels I watch, just don't let Al-Qaida kill me.  These actions go farther than Al-Qaida, this is about controlling the masses with fear.  "Second, the government does not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval."  But they do collect call logs without court approval,  someone give this man Section 222 of the Communications Act of 1934 which requires court approval for these very actions.  "Third, the intelligence activities I authorized are lawful and have been briefed to appropriate members of Congress, both Republican and Democrat."  Repulicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Greens, or whatever, it doesn't matter who you told to break the law, but the law has been broken.  Sure, there may be a Presidential Order written to supercede laws you want to break, but are those orders legal?  We'll soon see.  "Fourth, the privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities."  Um, how can anyone claim this.  A simple cross reference of the call log database, with other databases with personal information is all that's needed to completely destroy any shred of privacy we have remaining.  And that's ingoring the fact that collecting call data is a major breech in privacy.  If I  call 1-900-HOT-SEX,  and the government knows about it, that's my privacy you aren't protecting.