“Given George W. Bush’s history of outright lying, especially on national security matters, it may seem silly to dissect his words about the new disclosure that his administration has collected phone records of some 200 million Americans,” writes Robert Parry. “In his brief remarks, however, Bush didn’t define what he meant by ‘ordinary Americans’ nor whether the data-mining might cover, say, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people, just not ‘millions.’”

The stated goal of tracking phone numbers that had been called by al-Qaeda operatives could be easily done with warrants from the FISA court. There would be no need to compile every personal and business call made by 200 million Americans.

“It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” one person told USA Today. The program’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders, the person said. [USA Today, May 11, 2006]

In describing Bush’s policies over the past several years, the word “Orwellian” has sometimes been overused. But a government decision to electronically warehouse the trillions of phone numbers called by its citizens over their lifetimes is the essence of George Orwell’s Big Brother nightmare.

Read his full piece at Consortiumnews.com