USA Today: NSA building massive database of phone records

Well, the Fourth Amendment has been both shredded, and flushed down the toilet. This is from CNN.Com:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government has been secretly collecting records of ordinary Americans' phone calls in an effort to build a database of every call made within the country, it was reported Thursday.

AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth telephone companies began turning over records of tens of millions of their customers' phone calls to the National Security Agency program shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, said USA Today, citing anonymous sources it said had direct knowledge of the arrangement.

The big phone companies are handing over all records of customers domestic phone calls. They are handing over your landline calls, your cell phone calls--everything to the government. The federal government is domestically spying on you without a search warrant, or probable cause. Continuing on:

The White House defended its overall eavesdropping program and said no domestic surveillance is conducted without court approval.

"The intelligence activities undertaken by the United States government are lawful, necessary and required to protect Americans from terrorist attacks," said Dana Perino, the deputy White House press secretary, who added that appropriate members of Congress have been briefed on intelligence activities.

So why is the government building this database of every phone call made by every American in this country, without a search warrant? Such a database is powerful enough to where it can be abused by those, who may not be interested in fighting terrorism. Can you imagine Karl Rove going over the phone records of Howard Dean? Or perhaps even Rove and Cheney peeking into the phone records of Patrick Fitzgerald? This database is fraught with possible abuse. It is not legal, not necessary, and not required to protect Americans for terror attacks--no matter what the White House says.