Nation of Suspects in Land of the Free
by Steve Chapman, Baltimore Sun

The Bush administration has managed to cross George Orwell with Sting. Every step you take, every move you make, Big Brother will be watching you.

No one is exempt from the National Security Agency's program to amass a record of every phone call, with the help of major telecommunications providers. As one insider told USA Today, "It's the largest database ever assembled in the world."

And have no doubt: You're in it.

President Bush insisted, "We're not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans." In fact, that's exactly what his administration is doing - 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It is no longer possible (unless you're a customer of Qwest, which has refused to cooperate) to make a telephone call without the government knowing about it and keeping a record of it. We are all suspects now.

Even if you don't care about the privacy of your phone records, you might care that we have a president who feels no obligation to obey the law. You might care that if the government was secretly doing this, it may be doing other things that are even more worrisome. And you might care that one day, we may find that the free society we claim to cherish has become a police state.

Full story here.