For as long as we've known that the Bush administration routinely breaks the law by spying on American citizens without required warrants, the standard line from George W. Bush and his minions has been that only international transmissions are snooped and, within that select group, only those communicating with known terrorists are spied upon.

Now we have the bombshell disclosure yesterday that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been secretly collecting the phone records of tens of millions of Americans, using most of the major phone carriers in the United States.

If an American citizen "…is talking to al Qaeda, we want to know why," our fearless leader has said on many occasions since first getting caught with his hand on our telephones and keyboards.

Indeed, it was just yesterday that Bush said that he had authorized the NSA to "…intercept the international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations. In other words, if al Qaeda or their associates are making calls into the United States or out of the United States, we want to know what they're saying."

And, of course, you would need a calculator to figure out how many times those same assurances have been given by outgoing White House Press Secretary Scott "The Lyin' King" McClellan.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll tell you that I am not an experienced spy. I have never worked for the CIA or the NSA so I'm not sure exactly how their eavesdropping methodology works. But I have worked in computer security for about 20 years, have done my fair share of hacking, have even caught some bad guys in the course of my day job and know a tiny bit about "sniffing" over a telephone wire.

And, while hardly a simple job on a massive scale, the speed and sophistication of the parsing and data-aggregation technology that is available to the upper, most-secret reaches of our government makes something very clear about the president's program: Either it's incredibly broken and ineffective or they're lying through their teeth about the extent of the whole thing.

Let me give you an example. In my world, let's say I want to track down some real porn-surfing deviant on my company's international network. I would "sniff" the wire for people scanning the Internet with search qualifiers such as "O'Reilly + naked + falafel," or "Limbaugh + Oxycontin + orgy." "Cheney + snuff + film" might work too. But once I set my radar on that, I would find out in pretty short order where my culprit was located in very specific terms.

What should make it even easier on Bush's anti-Constitution crew is that, according to what they tell us, they already have half of their riddle solved. Given Team Bush's assertion that they're only spying on people talking to known terrorists, a logical conclusion is that they already know who's on one half of each phone call snooped -- which means, with today's technology, they should be mighty close to nailing themselves some real, live evildoers.

Which leads me to my questions that I'm hoping somebody in the White House or the NSA reads -- if they didn't get this post in transit -- and can clear up my confusion, lest I be forced to believe they're either lying or stupid:

• If you have already narrowed down who the terrorists are right down to the physical and logical addresses of their telephones or computers, why don’t you just go get them?

• Assuming you're filtering through millions of phone calls and you already have them winnowed to bad guys and their possible confederates in the United States, where's the results? I'm sure a political genius like Karl Rove would just love to shut us liberals the hell up by doing a perp walk -- before his own, of course -- with a really bad guy and being able to attribute the righteous bust to the "terrorist surveillance program." Wouldn’t that be worth its weight in political gold? So where's the prizes for all this concentrated effort?

• I know that many of us prickly Americans are absolutely obsessed with the whereabouts of the people who, well, you know, attacked us on September 11, but it's been almost five years and Osama bin Laden is still running free and podcasting threats at us. Why is it that you still don’t have him in custody with a massive program like this in place?

• According to Senator Russ Feingold, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, al Qaeda is still operating in at least 60 countries, which is roughly the same as when we were attacked in 2001. If you're doing all this spying and it's targeted at known members of al Qaeda, why hasn't that number gone down in almost five years?

• When you constantly say that our troops are "fighting for our freedom," isn't our government undermining the very freedoms our brave men and women are allegedly protecting?

Finally, there seems to be very little doubt that the White House has violated the law by spying on American citizens without warrants -- according to the USA Today story yesterday, it may be up to 200 million of us, or two-thirds of the U.S. population -- and I guess that leads to my final question.

How do we teach our children the value of obeying the law when the President of the United States sets such a horrible example?

You can reach Bob Geiger at geiger.bob@gmail.com