So Spend Less Time on the Phone If You're Worried About The Loss Of All Of Your Privacy

The FBI says "Yeah, we're spying on you, what are you gonna do about it?"

The FBI acknowledged late Monday that it is increasingly seeking reporters' phone records in leak investigations.

"It used to be very hard and complicated to do this, but it no longer is in the Bush administration," said a senior federal official.

Yeah, I'll bet. Funny what you can do without those pesky "checks and balances" and that annoying "oversight."

In a statement, the FBI press office said its leak investigations begin with the examination of government phone records.

"The FBI will take logical investigative steps to determine if a criminal act was committed by a government employee by the unauthorized release of classified information," the statement said.

Officials say that means that phone records of reporters will be sought if government records are not sufficient.

Apparently National Security Letters (authorized by the Patriot Act) are the linchpin to allowing this kind of spying on journalists to be done. That doesn't make it go down any smoother. It's amazing that the Republicans really haven't changed their tactics since the age of Nixon. They still go after journalists, they still collect intelligence on their political enemies. And this is necessary due to "extraordinary circumstances," they say. What's extraordinary is that we as a people have let this crowd get away with it for this long.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall goes a little more in-depth and notes that:

...the investigators also seem to be using legal methods at least nominally intended for use in counter-espionage or counter-terrorism. In this case, so-called National Security Letters, the use of which was dramatically expanded by the Patriot Act and has grown by more than 100 fold since 9/11.

Given the Bush administration's self-servingly indulgent definition of the War on Terror, I don't doubt that they would define finding leakers as a subdivision of fighting terrorism, or for that matter scrutinizing political opponents.

We need to know more about what Ross is talking about.

It seems of a piece with the administration's record of abuses of power. But what we know is too vague.