[Email, too, lest we forget, as all the coverage seems to.]

Gosh, I remember how, back in December, when we got this story right long before the SCLM, the idea that the Republicans would want to listen to everyone was just a paranoid fantasy. Well, as usual with Bush, it's bad beyond our worst imaginings. From non-Beltway USA Today:

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

Ah. The merger of corporate and governmental functions, as under fascism. (Note below that you can reward good behavior by switching to Qwest, who didn't participate in the program latest Republican assault on our rights as free citizens.)

The agency's goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders, this person added.

Well, look. I'm sure the Republicans would never use this database for political purposes, let alone ratfucking. Or end up privatizing the data and selling it to cable weasels and mortgage companies for phone scams. Or collection agencies under that nice new Bankruptcy Bill.

Move along people, move along! There's no story here!

And especially there's no story that Michael Hayden, the nice and not-at-all angry or hateful man who Bush nominated to head the CIA, ran this program:

Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, nominated Monday by President Bush to become the director of the CIA, headed the NSA from March 1999 to April 2005. I

And, of course, Bush lied about the program. Now that's no story, but here it is:

In defending the previously disclosed program, Bush insisted that the NSA was focused exclusively on international calls. "In other words," Bush explained, "one end of the communication must be outside the United States."

You learn something new every day, don't you? I didn't know that "every call ever made" had "one end outside the United States"! And I didn't know that "explain" and "lie" were synonyms! But then, I didn't go to journalism school...

As a result, domestic call records — those of calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders — were believed [by some] to be private.

Nice use of the passive voice there, what?

And what are they using our call records for? Again, we got this one right too, back in December:

This kind of data collection from phone companies is not uncommon; it's been done before, though never on this large a scale, the official said. The data are used for "social network analysis," the official said, meaning to study how terrorist networks contact each other and how they are tied together.

Right, "terrorists." Except that the Republicans say and believe that Democrats are terrorists, right?

Tip to those Democratic Beltway Consultants: If you don't recommend to your clients that they scramble their telephone calls and encrypt all their mail, your clients should sue you for lack of due diligence.

Tip to the Democratic clients of Beltway Consultants: If your consulant doesn't recommend ways for your to protect yourself against NSA snooping, ask them if they're already being blackmailed.

There's also the confusion typical of this story in the press from Day One:

They're confusing e-mail data with voice data:

The NSA's domestic program, as described by sources, is far more expansive than what the White House has acknowledged. Last year, Bush said he had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop — without warrants — on international calls and international e-mails of people suspected of having links to terrorists when one party to the communication is in the USA. Warrants have also not been used in the NSA's efforts to create a national call database.

All these stories are always careful to say voice and email when describing the nature of the program, but always veer off into describing voice only.

But I care a lot more about email, than voice. Why? Because I do my Democratic politics digitally, in email, not by voice. And given what we know about the Bush administration's behavior so far... Well, what do you think?

P.S. Reward good behavior:

Among the big telecommunications companies, only Qwest has refused to help the NSA, the sources said. According to multiple sources, Qwest declined to participate because it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants.