You're Being Spied On

See the link I provide below for the full story. We've brought this up in detail in past articles here but the mainstream media is finally catching on. Thank God.

Some may say this is OK with them. They have nothing to hide. I can think of a few reasons this should be meaningful to everyone.

• Bush has already shown a tendency to use whatever means he has at his disposal to bring down his political adversaries. What if in the database of phone calls he's able to find evidence that some reporter about to release a story of his plans to nuke Iran is cheating on his wife? Would it serve the American people better to have that information or to have this critic silenced? If you think this is an outrageous idea, ask Valerie Plame what she thinks.
• What if you have a friend who has a friend who is contacting someone involved with a group that is thought to have helped finance terrorists. Never mind that the group involved is a charity and they dispute the claim. Never mind that the claim isn't one the government will ever pursue through legitimate means in court because it's so flimsy the case would be thrown out immediately. None of that matters because now, the NSA has a connection and they have the right to listen to your phone conversations without a warrant. Think that's a stretch? Think as an American we should even have to worry about such a thing? Think again. Bush is required to get warrants now, by law, and he isn't doing so.
• The army is running short of its recruiting goals. One quasi-military branch of the government (NSA) has a database full of phone numbers and can easily associate those numbers with names and addresses. What if the army looked at that database for all of the calls to the Boy Scouts of America, Big Brothers of the Poor or boys catholic high schools? Shazam! They now have an entirely new set of potential recruits.

The possible abuses of this are endless and the fact is we've never trusted our private lives to the government in the past and we're not about to start now. No, I don't see black helicopters on the horizon, that isn't what I'm talking about. But a lot of good solid Democrats and Republicans are civil libertarians just like I am and they ought to see this intrusion for all of its ugly possibilities, same as me.

UPDATE: See what conservative commentator Joe Scarborough is saying about this issue here.