ARTICLE: “NSA has massive database of Americans’ phone calls: 3 telecoms help government collect billions of domestic records,” by Leslie Cauley, USA Today, 11 May 2006, p. 1A.

Connectivity requires code. Networks create rules. Every convenience results in a trade-off on privacy.

These are essential truths of our age.

But every time we bump into these emerging realities, the media usually treats them from some industrial-age perspective, applying Orwellian logic (consistently proven wrong by history; otherwise, how would terrorists "rule the world" as we're constantly told?) to every development.

Those call databases exist. The telecoms have them, and use them for their own ends (commercial). We live in a world where all this connectivity affords bad actors new ways to harm us, and so we ask our government to devise new ways to keep us safe. But then we get very unrealistic about how that’s supposed to happen.

The question isn’t, Should the government have access to such databases? I think they should. The question is, What can they do with them? Those questions will be decided ultimately in our courts. We should remain quite vigilant on the subject, and push our press to keep us informed.

But our press needs to watch the tone of its coverage. Knee-jerking back and forth isn’t the answer, because it puts the bin Ladens of the world in the driver’s seat.

We need to focus on what’s made us strong in the past and will keep us strong in the future: our horizontal networking, our resiliency in response to shocks and threats and perturbations, and our faith in a judicial system that has slowly but surely worked wonders throughout our nation’s history.