MB Civic

I KNEW my privacy was toast the day I took care of a credit card bill by phone. Before I could answer the service rep’s request to deduct the funds from my bank account, he said, ”Mr. Jackson, I have your bank account up on the screen.”

The rep was in India. Halfway around the world, guys and gals have their electronic mitts on my moolah, moving my cheese and leaving any sense of security full of holes.

I bring this up not because this is news, but because it restrains me from reflexive apoplexy about the National Security Agency secretly collecting domestic phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, as first reported by USA Today. If we entrust Bank of America and American Express to entrust people in India with the personal information needed to verify accounts, then it is silly to fuss about Big Brother logging your child’s talk with Grandma, right? After 9/11, don’t we need an army of alert land-line and cellular patriots risking cauliflower ears for the moment that saves our lives?

Yes, except that I trust Bank of America and American Express more than this particular White House. It ignored its own communiques on Katrina. It claimed its communications said the weapons were in Tikrit. Its communications told them to put Senator Edward M. Kennedy, other Democratic and Republican politicians, infants, and a star from the 1950s ”Ozzie and Harriet” series on antiterror no-fly lists. Even as ”United 93″ is in release, how safe do you really feel at the airport as you, your laptop, and other gizmos breeze through the X-ray machine and unscanned cargo is loaded in the hold as a randomly chosen octogenarian has a detector wand waved down her varicose veins?

President Bush reassures us that ”we are not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans.” If that makes you feel better, you have not considered three things.

One: Bush lied. He said in January that his surveillance program against Al Qaeda communications ”applies only to international communications. . . . One end of the communication must be outside the United States.”

Two: If it isn’t a blunder, it’s a blunderbuss. This White House transformed the hunt for Osama into the annihilation of Iraqi civilians. If actual lives do not matter, why should a phone call?

Three, the following compendium. It is nuts to entrust a phone call database of millions of Americans to:

A. A president who believes he can circumvent 750 new laws and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

B. A vice president who always wanted warrantless spying of domestic calls.

C. An attorney general who refuses to discuss why his Justice Department dropped an internal investigation of the legality of the NSA’s surveillance activities.

D. Predatory phone companies who always seemed to have our number until we revolted with ”Do Not Call” lists.

E. An NSA that blew $1.2 billion on a Trailblazer project to refine data mining, according to the Baltimore Sun, after dumping ThinThread, a project the Pentagon’s inspector general said provided ”superior processing, filtering and protection of US citizens.”

Intelligence officials familiar with ThinThread told the Sun it died because Trailblazer was supported, ironically, by the former NSA director and current CIA nominee General Michael V. Hayden. When Bush ordered domestic phone record collection, the NSA threw ThinThread’s identity protection capabilities out the window.

Bush and the phone companies swear they are not listening to our actual conversations. If I were you, I would start saving up for bail. After all, our everyday language, especially if you love sports, offers ample opportunity to run afoul of an inept and overly invasive government. How many times have you ever said, ”That’s da bomb!” on the telephone?

It is easy to see what could happen to an ordinary conversation under this administration’s thin threads of technology and privacy.

”Hello, Al? How you and Kay doin’? Dawn back from college? Got summer plans? Fly to Washington? To the White House? Don’t forget to look up Sal and his Ma. He transferred to the Pentagon. His Ma can’t live alone anymore. But she still makes killer biscuits.”

You can see the NSA deciphering this: Al . . . Kay . . . Dawn . . . Fly to Washington . . . White House . . . blast! . . . Oh . . . Sal . . . Ma . . . Pentagon . . . killer.”

Code Red!!!!!