USA Today of all places has broken the news that the NSA has a massive database of domestic US phone calls. The legal authorization? None. As Glenn Greenwald put it:

We now learn that when Americans call their Aunt Millie, or their girlfriend, or their psychiatrist, or their drug counselor, or their priest or rabbi, or their lawyer, or anyone and everyone else, the Government is very interested. In fact, they are so interested that they make note of it and keep it forever, so that at any time, anyone in the Government can look at a record of every single person whom every single American ever called or from whom they received a call. It doesn't take a professional privacy advocate to find that creepy, invasive, dangerous and un-American.

I also find it worth noting how the government got this information: they asked for it, and every big telco (with the exception of Qwest) just turned over the records.

We are living in a society where the power of the State is increasingly being concentrated into a single entity (the Decider in Chief). At the same time, enormous undemocratic organizations called "Corporations" administer most of the ins and outs of our daily life, and function as both a perverse/corrupting influence and aider and abetter of wrongful State action.

It's like the worst of both worlds! This is what happens when you concentrate wealth and power, and remove checks, balances and real competition: mega-suckage. Big government and Big Business are in bed alright, tag-teaming the little guy.

UPDATE: In another perverse twise, the NSA effectively stomped out a Department of Justice investigation into their wiretapping programs by denying their lawyers security clearance. You can't make shit like this up.