NEW NSA BROUHAHA IS NOT NEW AND NOT BAD

WASH POST:

The Bush administration has secretly been collecting the domestic telephone records of millions of U.S. households and businesses, assembling gargantuan databases and attempting to sift through them for clues about terrorist threats, according to sources with knowledge of the program.

The "call detail records" enable U.S. intelligence agencies to track who calls whom, and when, but do not include the contents of conversations, the sources said ...

This type of intel gathering is NOT illegal or unconstitutional; (it's like setting up a roadblock or doing random searches - NEITHER OF WHICH REQUIRES A WARRANT OR PROBABLE CAUSE; IT MERELY NEEDS TO BE REASONABLE).

And - as a recent report about the 7/7 subway bombings in London revealed - it can possibly detect terrorists BEFORE THEY STRIKE. Which is good.

Politicians who deride it are fools. And there are plenty like that. In both parties.

MORE HERE. AND HERE, TOO. NYTIMES bias HERE.

BTW: Americans make BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of calls. Sifting through CALLING PATTERNS of a few million in order to ferret out some which might be terror-related is not "widespread surveillance" - as the Left-wing dominated MSM portrays it - but TARGETED intel gathering. WHICH CAN SAVE LIVES.

But then, truth and life are two things that the Left doesn't believe in.