Tempest in a teapot ???

If the numbers quoted below are anywhere accurate ...
30 taps over the last couple of years ?

30?
Not quite big brother, not listening (active monitoring vs. data mining and sampling of text/word streams) to everything said.

Lexington | The paranoid style in American politics | Economist.com:

"And the proof of dictatorship? On more than 30 different occasions, Mr Bush authorised the tapping of telephone calls made by American citizens. Tapping domestic telephone calls without getting a warrant is illegal. But Mr Bush claims that his constitutional powers as commander-in-chief allowed him to do so because all these calls were international ones. He maintains that going to the courts would have been cumbersome and that his first priority was to prevent another terrorist attack.

You can pick at this reasoning—for instance, there are retrospective warrants that might have done the trick. But it is hard to claim that Mr Bush is being outlandish on any of these scores. John Schmidt, an associate attorney-general under Bill Clinton, thinks Mr Bush has the constitutional power to approve such taps; General Michael Hayden, the deputy director of national intelligence, has argued that the programme “has been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States”.

That assertion is for Congress to probe, but the real argument here is surely one of nuance: it has to do with how much freedom you should reasonably curtail in the name of security. Mr Bush may have crossed a line, but he has hardly smashed through it. Most European countries have more intrusive surveillance regimes than America's. As for impeachment, the prospect of having to defend Mr Bush against the charge that he went a tad too far trying to avert a terrorist attack is the sort of thing Karl Rove salivates about."