January 18, 2006
Hysteria about Bush's spying lacks perspective

http://www.mcall.com/news/opinion/anotherview/all-goldberg1-18jan18,0,7313887.story?coll=all-newsopinionanotherview-hed

"..After 9/11, authorities found a bunch of e-mail addresses and phone numbers in the phones and computers of confirmed terrorists. They tracked down those leads. Most of the people the NSA started eavesdropping on â€" about 7,000 â€" lived overseas, and their phone calls were to other foreigners living abroad. But, according to Risen's book, ''about 500 people'' living in the U.S. who were in contact with suspected terrorists had their communications tapped. Risen calls this ''large-scale'' spying on the American people even though, as the Weekly Standard recently noted, this constitutes ''1.7 ten-thousandths of 1 percent of the U.S. population.''.."