The National Security Agency has been amassing a vast, secret database with records of tens of millions of telephone calls made by Americans, USA Today reported on Thursday. Telephone companies started to turn over records of millions of their customers' phone calls not long after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The government has created the largest database ever assembled, according to an anonymous source quoted by the newspaper.

The government apparently has even bigger plans "to create a database of every call ever made within the nation's borders" to identify and track suspected terrorists.

Think about that. Every phone call ever made.

No, not so fast.

This sounds like a vast and unchecked intrusion on privacy. President Bush's assurance Thursday that the privacy of Americans was being "fiercely protected" was not at all convincing.

We need to know more about this. The government, though, didn't offer confirmation or elaboration on Thursday. Based on the newspaper's reporting, this effort appears to go far beyond any surveillance effort that would be targeted at terrorist operations.

At first blush this program carries troubling echoes of Total Information Awareness, a proposed Defense Department "data-mining" expedition into a mass of personal information on individuals' driver's licenses, passports, credit card purchases, car rentals, medical prescriptions, banking transactions and more. That was curbed by Congress after a public outcry. It seems the people who wanted to bring you TIA didn't get the message.

This program seems to be far broader than the NSA surveillance of communications between the U.S. and overseas, which prompted great concern when it was revealed last December. Though that program is more intrusive-it involves eavesdropping on conversations-it is at least focused on communications between people in the U.S. and people abroad who are suspected of being connected to terrorism.

That overseas surveillance effort, this page has argued, could be justified and extended if it included some modest judicial oversight.

But this vast mining of domestic phone records … this is something else.

Alarmed members of Congress demanded answers on Thursday. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he would summon the phone companies providing the information-AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth-for a hearing. "We're really flying blind on the subject [of domestic surveillance] and that's not a good way to approach the Fourth Amendment and the constitutional issues involving privacy," Specter said.

Yes, we're flying blind.

Why would the government seek and store records of every telephone call to your doctor, your lawyer, your next door neighbor?

Tell us.