Phones for you...

What are we going to do about our phone calls? What are we going to do about this idea that the government is making a huge list of every single phone number that we call on a given day? Are we supposed to worry about that? I don’t know about you but that makes me a little nervous to dial up my friend Ahmed and talk politics. Who knows what they think about a guy named Ahmed from Lebanon.
This is a problem on a great many levels. At the forefront is this idea that the Bush administration has done anything in the past five and half years to make us believe that they are trustworthy. If there has been a more spin intensive White House I can’t remember it. Not since Dick Nixon has a president so adamantly told us to just mind our own business and he’ll take care of everything. Don’t worry little country; now go back to bed and dream of killing terrorists and gay people.
I find it hard to believe that this group of people who are so living in such an elevated level of fear wouldn’t be listening to random phone calls. If they can track them, they can sure listen to them. And since they believe they are the moral police and since they believe that breaking a law or two in the name of “safety” is acceptable it wouldn’t surprise me in the least.
On top of all that is this idea that they think that the terrorists don’t know that the government is going to monitor phone calls. You think that any terrorist that really has a clue, not your Moussaui’s but your Mata’s, isn’t going to use a disposable telephone, send text messages or that old school coded email? It would be too easy to bounce messages from here to say a friendly nation; then place to place until it hits Iran or Syria. They might even send an overnight package, anything but a telephone.
I am waiting for the first raid of a Persian rug dealer in the Bronx because they were making too many phone calls to Pakistan. Let’s get real here. This is just another example of an administration so freaked out by their lack of respect for he terrorists in the first place and the fact that they missed so many obvious signals that they are running around like chickens with their heads blown off. They are just grasping at straws and telling us we are the safer for it. They may have a plan but like everything that the elephant does, it’s always a step behind the mouse.
So to the guys at the NSA, all those calls to 1 800-MAN-HUNK on my list were just wrong numbers. And to those of you afraid of what they are doing I think be very afraid. Not just about the lack of respect for civil liberties and the willingness to throw the baby out with the bathwater that exists on the right, but really about how lame this administration is in protecting us from another attack. I would trade the NSA program in a second for one that searches the cargo that comes into our ports every day. But that would cost money and that would mean raising taxes and … well protecting us from terrorists isn’t more important than the money stuffed in my mattress. Right?