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[JimH]

Reuters phone call records were secretly retrieved by the U.S. Federal Government last year, but it only became public this week.  It is believed to be part of a criminal investigation, but, in my opinion, it crosses an important boundary that safeguards a free press.  This is a very bad event.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/associated-press-says-u-government-seized-journalists-phone-001433899.html

[KingSparta]

This is just another example of the type of politics of the current white house endorses.

I do believe that this came from this highest level of this democrat/liberal regime.

I am not saying the republicans would be any better, they are both corrupt.

the sad thing is we will never know the real truth, it will be covered up to protect Obama.

[InflatableMouse]

...it crosses an important boundary that safeguards a free press.  This is a very bad event.

Absolutely.

But with all respect to anyone believing otherwise, I think it is ignorant to think this is not already happening on an even larger scale. Remember Murdoch wiretap and bribary scandal where Prime Minister Cameron admitted the case was part of much wider problems of corruption in government, and it points to the criminal partnership of private corporations and government agencies? This is "only" what comes out to the public, but really, this is just a tip of the iceberg.

A few facts about the Netherlands. In 2009, the UN voiced its concern on the large amounts of phone taps in the Netherlands; averaging 1700 per day in the 2nd part of 2007! Do you think this number came down since then? It wouldn't surprise me if it doubled or even trippled but we will never really know; they made that mistake once and they won't make it again. Just consider the resources needed for that, its insane and it doesn't even help! Nowhere in the world does a government request more userdata from Google than in the Netherlands. They tried to force ISP's to save everything everyone does on the internet for 18 months. It failed, they tried 12 months, failed again and they are now down to the EU standard of 6 months. But they try ... and no one knows who has access to that data and who is looking into what from whom. Who is checking those who check us? Our minister of justice recently submitted his plans to allow our national security and cibercrime team to hack computers based on "suspicions" anyhwere in the world without prior permission (based on their own discretion ... This should scare you too). All of this is already happening, its a violation of people's privacy and could be seen as illegal but nothing can be done about it because our laws don't really protect against such crimes and they are smart enough to find ways around them to semi-legalize their offenses.

It's only going to get worse because they refuse to acknowledge that you don't have to compromise privacy to increase security.

We've been told we have to trade off security and privacy so often -- in debates on security versus privacy, writing contests, polls, reasoned essays and political rhetoric -- that most of us don't even question the fundamental dichotomy.

But it's a false one.

Security and privacy are not opposite ends of a seesaw; you don't have to accept less of one to get more of the other.

The debate isn't security versus privacy. It's liberty versus control.