A report in USA Today that the National Security Agency was building a
database of Americans' phone records, with the help of three major U.S.
telephone companies, reignited discussion around the country about the tricky
balance between civil liberties and counterterrorism efforts.
Emblem of the National Security Agency. It was
reported on Thursday, May 11,2006, that the government is secretly
collecting record of ordinary Americans' phone calls in an effort to build
a database of every call made. [AP] |
While it was too early to get a scientific read on the nation's thoughts on
the program, interviews and a scan of closely watched Web logs appeared to
indicate a split that mirrored opinions on the NSA wiretapping program disclosed
late last year.
Ask Marie Martin what she thinks of revelations that a federal agency is
collecting the phone records of tens of millions of Americans, and her thoughts
turn immediately to Baghdad.
That is where her son, Army Staff Sgt. William Connor, fractured his back and
injured a leg when he was knocked out of a truck by Iraqi insurgent fire. To
Martin, the argument over domestic surveillance begins and ends there.
"I think anything they can do to get rid of the terrorists needs to be done,"
Martin, a 76-year-old retired customer service worker living in Colorado
Springs, Colo., said in a telephone interview Thursday. "I have nothing to
hide."
While some — like Martin — supported the records collection and trusted
President Bush's assertion Thursday that Americans' privacy was being
"fiercely" protected, others expressed grave worries about a secretive and
unchecked administration.
"What concerns me most is I don't know what else they've got," said Bob
Demmers, 50, a letter carrier in Grand Forks, N.D. "Every month we're finding
out one more thing that they've been collecting on people. We don't know what's
coming up next."
Demmers said he was concerned the nation had been slipping away from the
Constitution since the Sept. 11 terror attacks, and said he wondered whether the
government was listening in on his own phone calls.
Without explicitly confirming the USA Today report, Bush, in a brief
statement from the White House, sought to assure the nation that "we're not
mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent
Americans."
The newspaper report said the NSA was not listening to
the content of the calls it was tracking, but was analyzing call patterns in
hopes of detecting terrorist activity.
