More on the NSA domestic spying story

Check out a couple of interesting posts on Digby's Hullabaloo blog regarding parallels between spying in the Bush and Nixon administrations; the second includes an excerpt from a forthcoming book, Nixonland:

• The Enemy Within
• Same As It Ever Was

And Steve Chapman wrote a great column in yesterday's Chicago Tribune entitled "A nation of suspects in land of the free." A quote:

In December, it emerged that the NSA was eavesdropping on the contents of phone calls and e-mail messages between Americans on U.S. soil and people abroad. That program was of doubtful legality, and so is this one. As a rule, federal law forbids phone companies from turning over calling records to anyone, and it forbids the government from getting call records without a court order or a national security letter....

Even if you don't care about the privacy of your phone records, you might care that we have a president who feels no obligation to obey the law. You might care that if the government was secretly doing this, it may be doing other things that are even more worrisome. And you might care that one day, we may find that the free society we claim to cherish has become a police state.

And the FBI today confirmed that it's much easier to get reporters' phone records than in years before George W. took office, according to ABC News:

"It used to be very hard and complicated to do this, but it no longer is in the Bush administration," said a senior federal official.