The way I understand it...
The phone logs do not keep names or recordings of conversations - they only keep the numbers and numbers called to and from and the time of the call and the duration of the call. So your number, your family's numbers, and your friends numbers are of little benefit to them. So do they simply discard all those numbers after 3 months or are they stored in a permanent database?
As witnessed by the recent Boston Marathon bombing, most of these terrorists are too smart to use a phone anyway. They seemed to prefer the Internet. So are they monitoring our emails also? Or do they have to get special permission to do that? There are a lot of questions that should be asked, in my opinion.
So what if the government has all these numbers? What's the big deal? That seems to be the attitude of a lot of people. There is oversight, they say. Congress has oversight as do the FISA judges. It is the best we can hope for after 9/11.
But I would suggest that that type of thinking requires a lot of faith in your leaders and institutions. I don't think we should entrust anyone in government with that much power. The only way I could be more comfortable with the program is if the press had more access to the information. I do not trust politicians of either Party to do what is right when power clouds their vision.
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