Listen up! Uncle Sam has your number

Ellis Henican

May 12, 2006

As usual, Earl Long got it right, a good 50 years ahead of his time.

"Don't write anything you can phone," the volatile ex-governor of Louisiana once famously advised. "Don't phone anything you can talk. Don't talk anything you can whisper. Don't whisper anything you can smile. Don't smile anything you can nod. Don't nod anything you can wink."

Listen to Uncle Earl, even if he was a legendary scoundrel who spent part of his time in office in a mental hospital.

His advice was so dead-on that no less a modern figure than Eliot Spitzer, the ambitious attorney general of New York, was parroting him not long ago on CNN.

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Spitzer's only addendum: "And don't e-mail anything."

Surely Earl would have mentioned e-mail if it had been invented.

But why do we have to keep learning life's big lessons, over and over and over again?

If the government doesn't draw some reasonable lines between protecting our privacy and keeping us safe, more and more people will handle the job themselves. They'll do like Earl said. They'll follow in the slippered footsteps of Vincent "the Chin" Gigante. Climb into a bathrobe. Saunter down the street. Mumble what you must into the ears of your closest confidantes.

As Chin and Earl knew instinctively, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't watching you.

Yesterday, people all across America woke to an eye-popping story in USA Today. Turns out Washington isn't only eavesdropping on calls to foreign countries. The National Security Agency is also building a mammoth electronic database of every telephone call that is ever made inside the United States.

Not just calls to foreign countries. Not just the communications of suspected terrorists. Today's high-tech spies are doing something that nobody knew about: logging the calls of tens of millions of law-abiding Americans - to their relatives, their neighbors and their friends.

It's another giant tear in the fabric of privacy in America, all in the name of terror fighting, of course.

"Are you telling me that tens of millions of Americans are involved with al-Qaida?" Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy asked incredulously yesterday.

Republican Arlen Specter demanded telephone executives from Verizon, AT&T and BellSouth, who've been turning over private customer data, come and tell Congress what they know.

That's a start at least, demanding answers from everyone involved.

But President Bush is still insisting the privacy of ordinary Americans isn't at risk at all. He forgets what makes us different from the enemies we are fighting against - our freedoms, our privacy, our values, our faith in the rule of law.

"The privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities," Bush said.

"We are not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans ... "

"Our efforts are focused on links to al-Qaida and their known affiliates."

Yes, the president said all that yesterday.

Earl Long knew better. So did Chin.

This is always the order these things go in, isn't it?

First they turn their attention on the New York mobster and the politicians on the bayou. Then they turn it on you and me.