I don’t have a fundamental problem with records of our phone calls – not the actual conversations, mind you, just the records of who called what number and when – being put into a searchable database so that in times of genuine danger (not the manufactured color-coded danger they’re trying to sell us most of the time), some court-appointed investigator can run some pre-approved query along the lines of:
select CALLER_NAME, CALLER_DATE
from PHONE_CALLS
where RECIPIENT='OSAMA BIN LADEN'
I don’t find this to be a terrible violation of my privacy and it does, in fact, have some chance of helping to track down some of the folks who may be genuinely trying to cause us harm. I have less objection to this, in fact, than to the various for-profit organizations that keep the huge databases from which this information is culled.
No, my problem is that this data has been collected and analyzed in secret, with absolutely no oversight, by an administration that shuns the rule of law, subverts constitutional rights, illegally backs out of treaties, and in general likes to think it has the power to do as it pleases, and seems to have a congress that agrees. There is absolutely no mechanism in place to prevent this data from being used criminally for political purposes.
You want free access to all that phone call data? Fine, but in exchange I’m gonna have to ask to be able to go The Light of Other Days (a favorite book of mine) on your buh-tocks. You can have my info, on one condition: make all that publicly accessible via Freedom of Information Act requests. That way, people like me can write queries like:
select count(*)
from PHONE_CALLS
where CALLER_ADDRESS='White House'
and CALL_RECIPIENT='Jack Abramoff'
Or, better yet:
select count(*)
from PHONE_CALLS
where CALLER_NAME='Rove, Karl'
and CALL_RECIPIENT='1-900-TEENSINBONDAGE'
For that privilege, I might just be willing to let ’em log my phone calls. The telemarketers get more use out of my phone than I do, anyway. I think they’re the real terrorist threat we should be sending troops after.