Wow! Look at how "hysterical" and "poutraged" all of DU USED to be...

[Ms. Toad]

182. No. You are missing the point.

They are not just getting disconnected information. They are getting a massive database which it is trivial to match up to every single US resident who has called or received a call on the Verizon (and likely other) networks.

The data should ONLY be gathered on individuals with respect to which there is probable cause to believe evidence of a crime will be obtained. That is how probable cause works. You don't get to go on massive fishing exercises on the off chance you will catch some person (who may well be innocent) in your net - except by violating the constitution.

If it really was just data - not data connected to specific, identifiable people, there would not be such justified concern. But it is not just disconnected data.

I am really appalled that so many people on a progressive site seem to have such regressive, 1984-like (or McCarthy-like, or Hoover-like) ideas about this (or any) government building a database about the movement and associations of the population.

Do you have any idea how valuable the House Unamerican Activities would have found the data being collected by the NSA? Had the government possessed the data about this current government has about Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo, Helen Keller, Leonard Bernstein, Burl Ives, Pete Seeger, Artie Shaw, Zero Mostel, Charlie Chaplin, Langston Hughes, and Orson Welles, Dolores del Rio, Danny Kaye, Dorothy Parker, Lena Horne, Gypsy Rose Lee, Burgess Meredith, Ruth Gordon, Eddie Albert, Richard Attenborough, Barbara Bel Geddes (and many many more) who courageously refused to participate in the witch hunt for their alleged communist associates? With phone data connecting them to each other, their refusal to testify would have been for naught.

Not to mention massive domestic surveillance on the theoretically violent and subversive organizations which the FBI infiltrated and spied on not much later (I was on the governing entity of one such organization - which, incidentally, won a Nobel Peace prize). As bad as the spying was - it would have been truly terrifying had this data been added to the mix.