It was just a matter of time before this would happen: Bush: "We're not trolling your personal life". No, just ...

USA Today reports the government has been secretly collecting records of ordinary Americans' phone calls in an effort to build a database of every call made within the country.

"Every call" means, I guess, every call.

According to Think Quest from 1999, "Each household in the USA makes or receives an average of 3,516 telephone calls each year." There are about 100 million households in the US. So 350 billion calls per year. Now the average phone call lasts three minutes (scroll down a bit here), so that's 1050 billion minutes, or say a rough trillion. There are 525,600 minutes in a year, so that means we have some 1.9 million years' worth of conversation to listen to.

I imagine a lot of it would be repetitive. "Yeah, I'm just on my way now. Okay. Okay. Yeah. See ya!" But of course they're not going to listen to all of it. They just think it would be nice to sort of have it, just in case. Insane.