statement from my boss's office:

JOINT STATEMENT FROM
Senator Liz Figueroa, Senator Joe Simitian, Assembly Member Fran Pavley, Assembly Member Mark Leno

"We have just learned today that the National Security Agency in Washington, D.C. has been collecting literally millions, if not billions of telephone records of private citizens here in the United States. The government has no reason to believe any of these people – very likely including all four of us – have done anything at all wrong. The government did not obtain a warrant to collect this information, had no probable cause to believe we have engaged in any wrongdoing, and yet has been collecting what may be the world’s largest database of information about private telephone conversations in history.

"At least three giant telephone companies -- Verizon, AT&T and BellSouth -- simply gave their private and confidential customer information to the government without any question. One company we know of – Qwest – did ask the NSA for a warrant, as the law requires. The government said it would not obtain one, and Qwest quite properly said it could not hand over such sensitive information under such circumstances.

"We are the authors of a bill, SB 202, that would make it a crime for telephone companies to turn over exactly this kind of information to anyone other than their customer. When we introduced the bill, we had no idea the biggest violator would be our own federal government – and that phone companies would have no qualms about handing over mountains of private data without even asking if the government had any reason to believe the customers were acting unlawfully.

"This is one of the most enormous violations of privacy we can imagine. We demand to know why our telephone companies have given our private phone calling information away, and why, as both customers and as elected officials, we had to find out about this in the press."

i love living in california and having sane, rational, and just plain terrific elected officials who "get it"