Still, mining domestic calls is a highly unusual, and probably unprecedented, activity for a spy agency set up to intercept and analyze foreign intelligence. And it is striking that the three telcos, AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon, handed the information over sheep-like to the spooks without pressing for warrants or court approval. Only Qwest Communications (nyse: Q – news – people ) balked, in spite of the NSA’s arm-twisting.

Many national security experts criticized the NSA for skirting the court set up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to deal with such issues, as it did with its wiretapping program. “They didn’t do enough to make the law work,” said James Lewis, director of technology and public policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Any congressional inquiry into the call database is unlikely to yield much. The NSA is likely to characterize its call database as part and parcel of its routine data-mining activities. When grilled about its failure to ask for court approval, “they’ll argue that they bought the data from the companies and used it for statistical analyses,” said Lewis.

It is also unlikely the Federal Communications Commission will investigate or fine the telcos for handing over the data. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, a loyal Republican, will be hard-pressed to buck the Bush administration on the issue. In any event, polls have shown that the public overwhelming supports the administration’s wiretapping for counterterrorism purposes.

And this new revelation brings up fewer privacy concerns: There is a big distinction between eavesdropping on private conversations and analyzing call traffic for patterns. As one Washington telecom lawyer put it, “It’s a nonstarter.” ~Forbes

This comes back to basic principles. The question is not whether the NSA has been listening in on your phone conversations, as if out of a scence from the ridiculous V for Vendetta, but whether they have any rightful authority to access information like this, particularly without presenting warrants or some demonstration before a court that their request is legitimate. (We could get into the even more fruitless debate of whether the government can even have something like the NSA under a strict reading of the Constitution, but who would we be kidding?)

If they have the authority, they surely must need warrants for it to provide some meager oversight. They do not get to “request” what should presumably be confidential information and take it from the unthinking collaborators at corporate headquarters without demonstrating before a court why they need it. Not under a govermment of laws, they don’t. But we’re all becoming more and more aware that we don’t live under any such government and haven’t for a long time, and now we are beginning to count the costs.