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Attorney Patricia Williams says she doesn't get it:

All summer we listened to incoherent testimony from the Attorney General of the United States. Alberto "prohibitions against torture are quaint" Gonzales, the guy who believes "there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution," had tried to bully a near-comatose John Ashcroft into OK-ing a secret warrantless wiretapping program that illegally spied on citizens. Gonzales’s general uncooperativeness was so great that there was loud Congressional discussion of censure or even impeachment.

Yet here we are, only a few weeks after all the brouhaha about his fronting for President Bush’s pursuit of an ever more secretive unitary executive–and Congress passes a law that legalizes precisely the kind of warrantless wiretapping the Bush Administration, through Gonzales, was seeking.

Not only that, but the law names the Attorney General as one of two officials who can determine whether a particular wiretap is justified. Merriam-Webster, please keep this in mind as an example of the term irony.

Williams goes on:

[E]very time you call a customer hot line or directory assistance there’s a good chance you've been switched to someone in India or the Philippines...[The new law] allows for blanket data-mining of any and all electronic and telephonic communication by anyone, anywhere, whether chatting with a spouse, shopping for sex toys, making a doctor’s appointment or confessing to a priest.

Only in America could this happen, the fat and happy land where liberties and rights to privacy are chipped away without a fight.