government excuse to spy on you

The massive government data base of telephone calls was built without court warrants or the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a panel of federal judges established to issue secret warrants, according to people with direct knowledge of the arrangement.

The administration's warrantless programs apparently violate the Constitution's Fourth Amendment, which bars "unreasonable searches and seizures" and requires warrants for searches, as well as the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that established the secret court.

Harold Koh, dean of Yale Law School and author of The National Security Constitution, called the scope of the database "quite shocking."
"If they had gone to Congress and said, 'We want to do this without probable cause, without warrants and without judicial review,' it never would have been approved," said Koh, a former law clerk for the late Supreme Court justice Harry Blackmun, "I don't think any FISA court would have approved this kind of scale of activity."

As a general rule, telecommunications companies require law enforcement agencies to present a court order before they will turn over a customer's phone records. Under Section 222 of the Communications Act, first passed in 1934, phone companies are prohibited from giving out information about their customers' calling habits.

Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, questioned why the phone companies would cooperate with the NSA."Why are the telephone companies not protecting their customers?" he said. "They have a social responsibility to people who do business with them to protect our privacy as long as there isn't some suspicion that we're a terrorist or a criminal or something."