PHONE COMPANIES, THE NSA, AND PRIVACY: Here’s a roundup (free link) from the Wall Street Journal. Excerpt:

The three phone companies have been handing over phone numbers and calling information since shortly after September 11, 2001, while withholding names, addresses or other personal customer data, according to media reports. But it would be easy for the NSA to obtain that information by cross-checking the data with other readily available databases. The companies didn’t provide any information about the contents of the calls.

Read the whole thing. And yes, you can usually find out who’s behind a phone number by simply typing it into Google, and you’ll even get a map to their house, which seems like more of a privacy invasion to me.

UPDATE: Video from the NSA, over at Hot Air.