It appears the NSA might be conducting some politically motivated domestic surveillance, grabbing the telephone calls of a Democratic Governor and reporting those calls to bush Administration officials.

It’s not suprising that this junk would go on, because power corrupts.

We have given the government so vastly much power to surveil us, that we have no real privacy expectations left. We should expect that everything we do or say can be monitored by the government.

The only privacy “right” we enjoy is maybe the right to collect damages for some disclosures of the things that the government learns about us.

But it’s pretty obvious that we do not any longer have any way to prevent the government from collecting any information it wants, or listening in or watching us.

As long as we have an independent-minded judiciary, we at least have a hope that there will exist someone in power to try to give us justice in the face of government pressure.

But if we populate the courts with judges who reject broad privacy rights on ideological grounds …………

The Albuquerque Tribune: Did NSA tap Dem Gov Richardson’s phone?
WASHINGTON - Gov. Bill Richardson is concerned that some of his phone calls were monitored by a U.S. spy agency and transcripts of them were given to the president’s nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton.

Richardson called Sen. Chris Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, to express his concerns after Dodd revealed that Bolton had on 10 occasions asked the National Security Agency for the intercepts of phone conversations involving Americans.

[snip]

Sparks said Richardson’s call to Dodd was triggered when he read an online story by Washington journalist Wayne Madsen. The story said intelligence community “insiders” claim the NSA circumvented a ban on domestic surveillance by asserting that the intercepted calls were part of “training missions.”