“It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” the paper quoted one source as saying. The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within U.S. borders, it said the source added.

The NSA has “access to records of billions of domestic calls,” USA Today said. Although customers’ names and addresses are not being handed over, “the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information,” it said. ~MSNBC

Remember the outrage among Republicans when Bubba’s administration first toyed with this kind of database at the White House? Remember the anxiety caused by NSA’s Echelon program? I wonder if conservatives will be able to recall the reasons why they found it slightly troublesome that the government was working on projects like these. They might start by taking note of this little item.