I suppose I am not too concerned about the government listening in on my telephone conversations.

Frankly, I can't imagine somebody in government feeling it necessary to hear me complain to my buddies about what a hack golfer I am.

Or to hear me tell my mom when I'll be over to replace her kitchen faucet.

Nonetheless, the fact that the government could do that without a warrant is a bit unsettling to me.

And that's pretty much what the government was doing in the name of fighting terror.

W was using the National Security Agency to do a little warrantless wiretapping of suspected al-Qaida-linked individuals.

Wiretapping is nothing new. The government has been wiretapping bad guys since the advent of the telephone.

But until now you either had to have single-party consent or a warrant.

Now, it seems, W interpreted Congress' vote to declare war against Iraq as permission to do warrantless wiretapping.

"Time of war" presidential declarations that tend to trample civil rights aren't new, either.

Shortly after the beginning of World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the round-up of 120,000 Americans of Japanese heritage and had them stuffed in internment camps.

So much for their civil rights. They got locked up by virtue of their nationality.

Of course, looking back, we've pretty much decided the Japanese thing was a moral black eye for the U.S.

We learn. We grow.

But now W is pulling the same type of thing, albeit not quite as heinous.

The burning question for me is why?

W said that only calls from or to foreign countries were bugged.

If you were calling from Warsaw to Leesburg, or Los Angles to New York, for that matter, your call wouldn't be monitored.

But, "If somebody from al-Qaida is calling you, we'd like to know why," said W.

OK, fair enough, but honestly, there was a process for wiretapping those calls in place already.

It would have been easy for W to eavesdrop on those conversations under the existing rules.

The warrants that W sidestepped would have been handled by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

That court virtually never turns down a warrant and most warrants are granted within a day. The term "rubber stamp" comes to mind.

Beyond that, if the government deems it an "emergency situation," it can start wiretapping right away and wait up to 72 hours before even requesting the warrant.

Nonetheless, W felt it necessary to circumvent the court to do the wiretapping.

W says "a few numbers" were bugged. Published reports say more than 500.

W says the NSA routinely reviewed the program.

But the New York Times reports that acting Attorney General James Comey refused to sign off on the program in 2004 - two years after its inception.

After that, W's guys arranged a hurried visit to the hospital where Attorney General John Ashcroft, suffering from gallstone complications, reluctantly agreed to sign off.

Also in 2004, W said this:

'Anytime you hear the government talk about wiretap, it requires - a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so.'

A reporter asked W about that last week. W said he was talking about 'roving wiretaps.' Oh, yeah, roving.

I find it troubling that W has been so disingenuous about this. I don't like it when politicians are disingenuous, which, anymore, is pretty much all the time.

And downright annoying is the fact that the justice department's first investigation with regard to this whole mess is aimed at finding out who leaked the information about W's supersecret wiretapping program to the press.

One would think the first priority would be to determine the program's constitutionality, wouldn't one?

I think Congress and the Justice Department needs to sort this out.

There are significant civil rights and privacy issues at play here.

I know it's important to keep us safe from terrorists. But I don't think we need to shred the Constitution to do it.

I am confident we can be safe and free at the same time. [[In-content Ad]]