I was thinking about the USA Today story. The NSA’s goal is to acquire a database with records of every call ever made in the United States. They aren’t taping all of the actual calls, just keeping records of who called whom when. There was also a hint on CNN from the author that this program may have been planned before 9/11.
What would you do with that kind of database?
I can’t see that it serves much of an investigative purpose. Police already have access to phone records with a search warrant if there is probable cause that a crime was committed. FISA allows even more leeway in the definition of probable cause on national security issues. Is collating all of this information for “patterns” really going to add anything substantial to our national defense?
Politically, on the other hand, such a database can be put to enormous advantage, especially for a party that expects (as the Republicans did in 2001) to be in power forever. There is tremendous advantage in knowing who political opponents have spoken with and when those conversations took place. There is even more advantage for the leak-obssessed in knowing who certain reporters talked to in the days leading up to politically-damaging stories.
I suspect a thorough investigation into exactly who had access to the information the NSA is accumulating would be very revealing. There is no way this power-mad administration could possibly refrain from the overwhelming temptation to use this vast accumulation of data for political purposes. In fact, that’s probably why they started collecting it in the first place.