Phone in the poll

After news broke that the NSA has been populating the "largest database ever assembled in the world" with telephone records in an effort to track calling patterns, a Washington Post-ABC News polls was conducted, by telephone, to check the opinion pulse on the subject.

An astonishing 63% of surveyed people claimed that they found the program "acceptable." Furthermore, 66% said that they would not be "bothered" if they learned the NSA had been tracking their own phone calls.

Can one help but wonder that, given the current atmosphere and the knowledge of both the NSA call tracking program and the warrentless wiretapping program, also by the NSA, are people now biased toward simply conceding that monitoring and surveilling Americans is acceptable and might actually be doing so out of, oh, I don't know ... fear of being watched?

I imagine a telephone poll conversation going something like this:

WaPo/ABC: It's been reported that the National Security Agency has been collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans. It then analyzes calling patterns in an effort to identify possible terrorism suspects, without listening to or recording the conversations. Would you consider this an acceptable or unacceptable way for the federal government to investigate terrorism? Do you feel that way strongly or somewhat?

Subject: Wait, you're asking me -- on the freaking telephone -- if I think government monitoring of telephone calls is ok or not? Are you nuts? Uh ... I mean ... of course! Perfectly fine.
... click.