Upon Further Review, Maybe Americans Are Not So Thrilled With NSA Data Base

We told you Friday that, according to an ABC-Washington Post poll, 63% of Americans back the National Security Agency's collecting of a massive data base on phone calls placed by average Americans. That was the day after the story broke.

Given a day or two to think about it, the American public seems to have done an about face. In a Newsweek poll, conducted Thursday and Friday and released online today, 53% of Americans feel the program "goes too far in invading people's privacy. Forty-one percent say it's a necessary tool to fight terrorism.

Taking things one step further, 57% feel the Bush-Cheney administration has gone too far in expanding presidential powers.


photo credit: cnn.com

CHENEY PUSHED FOR WIRETAPPING OF CALLS INSIDE U.S., NY TIMES REPORTS

In a story that will be published Sunday morning, the New York Times is reporting that Vice President Dick Cheney, after the 9/11 attacks, pushed for warrantless surveillance of domestic phone calls and e-mails made from one location within the U.S. to another - not just those made to or from locations outside the U.S. The Times report said NSA officials resisted the plan and the current program of tapping calls to or from the U.S. was put in place.

CHENEY'S HANDWRITTEN NOTES SHOW EARLY INTEREST BY VP IN PLAME CASE

Newsweek is reporting that the prosecutor in the CIA leak case is focusing on hand written notes, written by Vice-President Cheney, in making the case against Cheney's former chief of staff Scooter Libby. The prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, disclosed the notes in a court filing Friday night, Newsweek reports. Fitzgerald hopes to show the notes prove an acute interest by Cheney and Libby - now indicted in the case - in the article written by Ambassador Joe Wilson. Wilson, as you all know by know, is the husband of the outed CIA agent Valerie Plame and wrote an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times critical of the Bush Administration's use of pre-war intelligence. The Fitzgerald probe was begun to determine if Plame's name was leaked by someone in the administration as a way to discredit Wilson.