This entire administration and its minions in Congress are like a mega-Bush, a Portguese Bush-of-war, a Bush-Borg.

Add Goebels, Himmler, and Hitler to the list perhaps? The claims of "executive authority" and "national interest" are a disturbing echo in history.

IMO it's not really even appropriate to call what appears to have been done a "wire tap." According to computer/communications industry reports, they "persuaded" the phone companies to reroute massive portions of all international messaging through routers located in the US and recorded all traffic going through the trunks, in order to apply "data mining" methods to look for "suspicious" signatures in messages. Such mass interception would unavoidably include communications by large numbers of persons/businesses not suspect in any way, and quite likely included large amounts of purely "domestic" traffic. Quite likely a number of friendly(?) foreign embassies should be greatly concerned as well.

Recent weaseling by administration spokespersons that claims that they only "tapped" messages involving "terrorist suspects" just means "we don't want to talk about all the rest of them."

The administration did, according to reports, discuss this method with the judges on the secret court, and were told that it (probably) would not be approved. Small wonder they evaded the court.

Now to see what the corporate responses may be...

John