{"id":7409,"date":"2006-05-15T10:10:21","date_gmt":"2006-05-15T14:10:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=7409"},"modified":"2006-05-15T10:10:21","modified_gmt":"2006-05-15T14:10:21","slug":"americans-are-concerned-about-the-secret-phone-call-database","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/americans-are-concerned-about-the-secret-phone-call-database\/","title":{"rendered":"Americans are<\/i> concerned about the secret phone-call database"},"content":{"rendered":"

The poll results didn’t make any sense. Friday, a Washington Post\/ABC News poll<\/a> showed that the public didn’t much mind that the government has kept a secret [tag]database[\/tag] that logs almost every [tag]phone call[\/tag] made by every American. What’s worse, respondents were asked specifically if it would bother them if there was a record of their phone calls, 66% said it would not.<\/p>\n

The WaPo\/ABC poll was conducted Thursday evening, about 12 or so hours after the [tag]USA Today[\/tag] report that broke the story first came to the attention of news-conscious Americans. Since then, as the public has had time to learn more about the NSA program, the results have gone the other way. Over the weekend, Newsweek released a poll<\/a> showing that 53% of Americans think the NSA’s surveillance program “goes too far in invading people’s privacy,” 57% think the Bush administration has “gone too far in expanding presidential power.”<\/p>\n

Today, USA Today<\/a> helped bolster Newsweek’s results.<\/p>\n

A majority of Americans disapprove of a massive Pentagon database containing the records of billions of phone calls made by ordinary citizens, according to a USA TODAY\/[tag]Gallup[\/tag] [tag]Poll[\/tag]. About two-thirds are concerned that the program may signal other, not-yet-disclosed efforts to gather information on the general public. […]<\/p>\n

“The combating-terrorism issue still has resonance with the American public,” says political scientist Richard Eichenberg of Tufts University in Massachusetts. “But the public’s tolerance for this sort of invasion of privacy may be topping out. It may be people are starting to say: ‘When is the other shoe going to drop? What else are they doing?’ “<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Indeed, going through the internals<\/a>, the public seems particularly concerned with what the federal government is going to do<\/i> with the information. Almost two-thirds of Americans (65%) said they are concerned that the government would misuse the call database program to “misidentify innocent Americans as possible terrorist suspects,” while similar percentages worried that the government would “listen in on telephone conversations within the U.S. without first obtaining a warrant” (63%) and abuse its power to “gather information on the general public, including obtaining bank records or Internet usage” (67%).<\/p>\n

In all, 54% of poll respondents said they believe the program is probably or definitely [tag]illegal[\/tag], while 62% want “immediate congressional [tag]hearings[\/tag] to investigate this program.”<\/p>\n

On Friday, conservatives gloated over the WaPo\/ABC poll results. Today, they have far less reason to be pleased.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The poll results didn’t make any sense. Friday, a Washington Post\/ABC News poll showed that the public didn’t much mind that the government has kept a secret [tag]database[\/tag] that logs almost every [tag]phone call[\/tag] made by every American. What’s worse, respondents were asked specifically if it would bother them if there was a record of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7409\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}