[MamaSwami]

re: It used to be that we didn't trust government very much around here. I still don't.

And you're right to distrust. Continue that, by all means.

However, there is no logical reason to distrust the government in this case. It doesn't make any sense. If you think about the technology involved, the reason is obvious.

We lost an enormous amount of personal privacy security when our phone systems went from analogue to digital. It brought enormous improvement in speed and quality and options, but now we are talking to each other over what are, at the end of the day, basically radio waves.

Wiretappers used to have to physically plant a bug on a hard phone line. Now your phone conversations can be picked out of the air. This is something that any idiot with a few pieces of eqipment from Radio Shack can do, and that is why it doesn't make sense to ask NSA to do it. It simply does not require the resources of a government agency to pull it off.

Why should a president... or ANY politician, for that matter... order a government agency with a history of leaking to monitor citizens uninvolved with non-national security situations when it would be so much safer, both politically and security-wise, to just hire a hacker to do it?

Personally, I don't think there is ANY reasonable expectation of "privacy" on any phone or internet activities these days.

[inquest]

Why should a president... or ANY politician, for that matter... order a government agency with a history of leaking to monitor citizens uninvolved with non-national security situations when it would be so much safer, both politically and security-wise, to just hire a hacker to do it?

It would hardly be safer. If the hacker is caught, and the trail is leaked back to the President, he'd be impeached in two seconds. But if he has the NSA do it, he can always deflect investigations by appealing to national security.