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point taken...but at the same time, i see that this is a new kind of enemy and a different kind of war than what's been fought in the past. I see this spying as necessary, but you're right to maintain a healthy level of distrust...but we can't allow our lack of trust in the government to impede them from doing all that they can to protect us...as a conservative, that's one of the pillars of government - strong national defense, and I see this as part of that.

"It used to be that we didn't trust government very much around here. I still don't."

I think that a healthy distrust of the government is good, but we have to really look at what constitutes a consequential violation of our privacy. It is one thing if an FBI agent overhears a call to your mistress and moves on to the next call. It's another thing if he overhears it and makes a note of it before moving on to the next call. And it's yet another if he calls your wife to tell her, even though he's supposed to be looking for Osama Bin Laden. IMHO, the first example is not consequential, so even though I might not like it, I can tolerate it. Given our advances in technology, we need to examine if 18th century standards of privacy are a luxury we can afford in the age of terrorism.

re: It used to be that we didn't trust government very much around here. I still don't.

And you're right to distrust. Continue that, by all means.

However, there is no logical reason to distrust the government in this case. It doesn't make any sense. If you think about the technology involved, the reason is obvious.

We lost an enormous amount of personal privacy security when our phone systems went from analogue to digital. It brought enormous improvement in speed and quality and options, but now we are talking to each other over what are, at the end of the day, basically radio waves.

Wiretappers used to have to physically plant a bug on a hard phone line. Now your phone conversations can be picked out of the air. This is something that any idiot with a few pieces of eqipment from Radio Shack can do, and that is why it doesn't make sense to ask NSA to do it. It simply does not require the resources of a government agency to pull it off.

Why should a president... or ANY politician, for that matter... order a government agency with a history of leaking to monitor citizens uninvolved with non-national security situations when it would be so much safer, both politically and security-wise, to just hire a hacker to do it?

Personally, I don't think there is ANY reasonable expectation of "privacy" on any phone or internet activities these days.