More editorials like this one, please:

“Why would the government seek and store records of every telephone call to your doctor, your lawyer, your next-door neighbor?”

USA Today reports that our government, yours and mine, isn’t just intercepting calls of suspected terrorists (or those they decide claim are such, and “US Persons” with whom they are talking) without submitting to the strictures of oversight through the FISA Court, but is keeping a database of phone records of tens of millions of American citizens. We’re not just talking a few hundred or a few thousand or even tens of thousands of possible terrorist sympathizers. That’s TENS of millions. We’ve got 300 million people or so in the United States. So what are we looking at? One in thirty people? One in ten? Think about that. How many people live on your block? Maybe they’re tracking whom you are calling.

The NY Times reports that: President Bush today denied that the government is “mining or trolling through the personal lives of innocent Americans…” From what I heard on NPR today, they are stressing how no content of calls is being monitored here, just who is calling whom, etc.

I’m sorry, but knowing whom I call is as much a matter of my personal privacy as what we talk about.

Oh, and a probe into whether that little “Domestic Surveillance Program” was illegal was squashed by denying the probers necessary security clearance. Nice.

But they say they’re looking out for our rights. Trust them, they say. Wuh? Sullivan comments:

You don’t abandon limited government, enable torture, declare the executive above the law, pile up countless signing statements to undermine the Congress … and then take pains to protect Americans’ privacy.

Any wonder why Bush’s approval ratings are so low? At what point do the freedoms given up mean we’ve lost to the fear of terrorism?

… The KC Star reports that the records collected involve the phone use of over 200 million people, or two out of three of us. Egads.