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Really? I oppose this kind of government survellience completely. I guess the lessons learned from WW2 and all the countries that had massive genocides have just been forgotten in the interest of a false sense of security.

I have no doubt that their intentions are good but we all know what road is paved with good intentions. Unless there is an absolute guarantee that someone with less than the best intentions cannot use this data against the population, I must oppose this kind of privacy invasion.

Mike

No idea what you're talking about. For the most part it was a trivial problem to successfully identify Jews, round them up and kill them. After all, their neighbors knew who they were and turned them in.

I doubt the Germans had to go very far into telephone records to find Jews and kill them.

As far as the Gypsies go, they'd look for the wagons ~ no cellphones in those days, so folks who lived on the road didn't make phone calls.

The lesson we learned in WWII was that it was possible for foreign enemies (current or future) to actually infiltrate our most sensitive government agencies and do us harm.

The Japanese and the Russians had spies present in our atom bomb project. The State Department and elements of the US Army civilian command structure were subverted.

That's why we need improved surveillance methods, and the ability to cross-correlate phone calling data with known enemy agents should help us find infiltrators, including Saddam Hussein's paid lackeys, commies, and alqaida supporters.

"I guess the lessons learned from WW2 and all the countries that had massive genocides have just been forgotten in the interest of a false sense of security. "

You mean the same WWII where the US government monitored telegrams, phone conversations, opened mail, and generally kept close tabs on all possible enemy activity within our borders? Your slippery slope argument is blown away by the fact that we are just as free today, if not moreso, than we were after WWII.

Trouble is, phone records are small potatos compared to the tax returns we all just filed. From this they know my salary, where I live, work, bank (and can impute the average balance of interest bearing accounts), the stock and properties I sold, my kids and their ages, where I go to church (donations), the list goes on and on. Nobody raises a single question about all of that.