Billions of NSA Records on Americans

When we first heard of the NSA spying, we were reassured only a few hundred possible al Qaida suspects and peripheral people were involved. That's not too many, is it? Or so the TV pundits seemed to say though many legal experts thought otherwise.

Well, a few hundred became a few thousand. But that's not too bad, not really.

Then a few thousand, became hundreds of thousands. Still, less than 1 per cent of our population. Many thoughtful people started speaking out but most Americans shrugged.

Then we heard that the FBI was getting thousands of tips a day from the NSA mining (and FBI agents resented wasting time on ordinary Americans on a wild goose chase). Maybe millions of phone calls and e-mails were being examined to generate those tips. The White House hemmed and hawed and said it wasn't really that many and the NSA didn't actually look at the contents of much of that.

Now we hear the NSA program involves tens of millions of Americans. At long last, Bush is running out of excuses and reasons to trust him. And if we're to believe Frank Main, crime reporter (I was wondering when those guys were going to start showing up!), we're talking billions of records:

President Bush on Thursday defended the government's secret collection of billions of telephone records in the war against terror, but key Illinois Democrats called for congressional hearings into the program.

USA Today revealed the National Security Agency entered contracts with phone companies to assemble a massive database of numbers Americans have called since Sept. 11, 2001.

So how did a few warrantless wiretaps from overseas to the United States turn into billions of records involving ordinary Americans? Congress needs to put a few people under oath and start asking questions. Lots of questions.