Just how deep is this rabbit hole, anyway?

I very rarely have occasion to cite USA Today in my blog (not exactly a bastion of high-quality journalism, IMNSHO), but today they've broken a story that's as relevant as it is disturbing - the US government, through the National Security Agency and at the behest of George Bush, has been tracking the phone calls of almost every single American citizen. Not just the terrorists, not even just those it has some small, potentially legit reason to believe are in cahoots with the terrorists... but every last customer of AT&T, SBC, Verizon and BellSouth. Unless you use Qwest or a small phone company that's off the federal radar, and never have called or been called by a customer of one of the other four mega-phone companies, your calls have been logged by the NSA.

In fact, "it's the largest database ever assembled in the world," according to one of USA Today's sources with first-hand knowledge of the program. Shortly after the September 11 attacks, it seems that the feds leaned hard on the major phone companies, insisting that it was their patriotic duty to hand over their internal records of their customers' dialing habits. Only Qwest had the integrity to insist on a warrant, an explicit authorization from the FISA court, or even a letter of authorization from the attorney general's office.

The FSA's response? "They told (Qwest) they didn't want to do that because FISA might not agree with them," according to one source, whose account was confirmed by another.

So, let's recap:

1. After the September 11 attacks, the Bush White House secretly began at least two domestic surveillance programs, by an executive order, with no oversight by Congress. (Many more such programs may, in fact, be underway - simply because we don't know of their existance yet doesn't mean that they aren't being conducted. I'd argue that it's highly likely that more shady programs are going to be outed before the air is finally cleared of this stink.)
2. Three years later, the president assures the public that "nothing has
   changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists,
   we're talking about getting a court order before we do so."
3. The NY Times almost blows the cover off Bush's to tap calls going to and from the United States (without a warrant or court order), but sits on the story until after the November 2005 election at the administration's request. The paper finally breaks the story in December.
4. During hearings last month before the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales dodges a question about the administration's authority to monitor domestic phone traffic without first getting a warrant - although he knows for a fact that such a program has been ongoing for several years, he responds abiguously: "I wouldn't rule it out."
5. Today we discover that the president's fervent desire is to monitor every American who happens to use a telephone, without a warrant, and without even acknowledging that the surveillance is occuring. This despite his earlier insistance that surveillance is only for the "bad guys" in al Qaeda, and certainly not widely deployed.
   

Now, it's important to note that the NSA has not (as far as we know) been monitoring the content of all these calls - only the time, date, duration, originating and receiving numbers. But if you made a call to your friend in Missouri, the government knows how long you shot the bull. And if you called PETA to praise their latest campaign (or even to object to it), the NSA's all over that, too. Heck, if you punk'd your friend by calling him 20 or 30 times in the middle of the night and hanging up, chances are good the feds know all about that, too.

And no one in the Bush administration thought this information was the least bit important for you to know.

That loud splat you hear? That's your civil liberties dying in a pulpy squish somewhere much farther down the depths of this hole. But we won't see that nasty mess for a while yet - there's still much more dark, dirty rabbit hole to tumble through.