All the President's G-Men

The following is an excerpt from a recent Harper's Weekly column:

"It was revealed that the National Security Agency, with the assistance of AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth, has secretly stored the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans. 'It's the largest database ever assembled in the world' said an anonymous whistleblower. A poll found that 63 percent of Americans feel that it is acceptable for the NSA to build such a database."

"It was reported that the United States was analyzing phone call records of reporters from ABC News, the New York Times, and the Washington Post to determine the identities of CIA employees who leak information to the press. 'It's time,' a federal law enforcement official told a reporter for ABC News, 'for you to get some new cell phones, quick.'"

Something tells me that the aforementioned 63 percent are thinking, "What's the harm? If I'm not doing anything wrong, who cares if the government looks at my phone records?" They're not realizing that it doesn't matter if a citizen isn't actually doing anything wrong, it only matters if the government chooses to interpret that a citizen is doing something wrong. Say, oh, I dunno, like a CIA whistleblower leaking dirty little secrets. Something tells me Dubbie and his crew would call that wrong with a big fat W. And then comes the spin that when information like this is leaked, it empowers the enemy versus what it's really doing--protecting Americans and their constitutional freedoms from an administration on a grim power binge.