The Govt could CARE LESS about what you are doing as LONG as your are not actively conspiring with know Terrorists. Then they ARE going to keep an eye on you since by conspiring with our foes you have voluntarily surrendered your Constitutional Rights and declared yourself an enemy of US Civil Society.
WE the people have a right, via the agency of our Government, to be protected from those who would do us harm. Those who act as enemies of our society do NOT get to hide behind the Constitution they are trying to destroy. Conspire with Al Qeda and you are no longer a member of, but an enemy of, our Civil Society and must bear the consequence of your actions.
I saw an article a few years back on the software used to do this ....
Basically...one comes under suspicion by the (phone) connections one has.
NSA takes a known bag guy... and traces who he calls....let's say he calls 10 people a week, no problemo.
The computer image literally "draws a line" to those that he called. Now you take these 10 people... and the software traces who THEY call, and on and on...
So perhaps you are 12 people removed from the original "bad guy"...you are still effectively linked to him. This is where it gets sticky....as one poster points out...it depends on how fine a scope they put on the software.....as to if you'll fall under the watchful eye of NSA...and perhaps get a warrant issued to tap your phone. It COULD be construed as "guilt by association". But, and this is a big deal... maybe you've never actually met the "bad guy".
Actually, I agree with you. I think the Bush Administration is straight-up using the information collected by NSA to root out terror.
But you overlooked or ignored the larger point. What happens when the nanny-state Democrats take over and start using those records to root out people who order pizza more than once a week. Or look for Second Amendment types, or pro-life activists? If you think that won't happen, think back to the Clinton years and Waco or Ruby Ridge.
President Bush I trust to do what he says. The other guys...not so much.
You may want to consider this quote from the nominee for Director ofthe CIA, General Hyden:
"I have met personally with prominent corporate executive officers. (One senior executive confided that the data management needs we outlined to him were larger than any he had previously seen). [...] And last week we cemented a deal with another corporate giant to jointly develop a system to mine data that helps us learn about our targets."
http://www.nsa.gov/releases/relea00072.html
Yes, the government is very interested in this data!
In fact, they are so interested that they make note of it and keep it forever, so that at any time, anyone in the Government can look at a record of every single person whom every single American ever called or from whom they received a call. It doesn't take a professional privacy advocate to find that creepy, invasive, dangerous and un-American.
Come on people, do you really trust tomorrow's (as yet unknown) political leaders?
NOT ME!
The values being expressed by some on this thread are truly scary!!