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If we discovered that we only had five minutes left to say all that we wanted to say, every telephone booth would be occupied by people calling other people to stammer that they loved them.

Ever since Woodward and Bernstein, there's sort of been an epidemic of confidential sources in Washington, in particular where people will actually - when you call them up on the phone, they'll say, 'This is off the record,' or, 'This is on background,' or they don't even wait for you to say anything.

What I believe is that a lot of the NSA's telephone metadata program is the result of misinformation spread by a traitor, Edward Snowden.

I sometimes question whether journalists here are being asked to take up roles that are not ours. I get calls from people complaining that their telephone is out of order or that electricity is cut, and I sometimes wonder why don't they call the telephone or electric company.

As we have all said, we understand that electronic surveillance is a vital tool in the war on terror. We all want to know when Osama bin Laden is calling: when he is calling, who he is calling, and what he is saying.

To tell you the truth I am hard put to think of anyone who's career was affected significantly by making all those phone calls and I must be wrong. I must be wrong! Because it has just got to pay off!

The phone is one hundred, one hundred and ten years old. There was a middle period where the government had a broad ability to surveil, but if you look at human history in total, people evolved and civilizations evolved with private conversations and private speech.

Something very worrying has been going on at Scotland Yard. We now know that in dealing with the phone-hacking affair at the 'News of the World,' they cut short their original inquiry; suppressed evidence; misled the public and the press; concealed information and broke the law. Why?

Big companies, which spend tens of billions of dollars annually on 'call centers' to take orders and provide customer support, increasingly rely on speech recognition not just to handle requests for information but to process customer orders.

My well-discussed 'paranoia' urges me to believe that some tiny segment of the NSA's parsing algorithm is finely tuned to my voice.