I think I know—it’s that President Bush is President. I got your number.
The OpinionJournal.com has your number too.
Another nonthreat to your civil liberties.
Saturday, May 13, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
The Bush Administration’s Big Brother operation is at it again—or so media reports and Democrats this week would have us believe. We suspect, however, that this political tempest will founder on the good sense of the American people much like the earlier one did.
Last December, the New York Times reported that after 9/11 the National Security Agency began listening to overseas phone calls of suspected terrorists, including calls placed from or received inside the U.S. This was supposed be a scandal because the tapping was done without a warrant from something called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. But as the debate wore on, it became clear that the 1978 FISA statute didn’t block a President’s power to allow such national-security wiretaps, and that most Americans expected their government to eavesdrop on terror suspects.
Now comes a sensationalist USA Today front-pager suggesting an even larger scandal. The government is “amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans—most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime.” Worse, reporter Leslie Cauley writes, while President Bush had suggested after the wiretapping story that “domestic call records” (her words) were still private, we now know that’s “not the case.”
Democrats are outraged, or at least they pretend to be. And major papers have joined the chorus, with the Washington Post calling the newly reported program a “massive intrusion on personal privacy.” We’re prepared to be outraged, too, if somebody would first bother to explain in detail what the problem is.
Let’s start by debunking Ms. Cauley’s piece of journalistic sleight of hand.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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