Dollar General privacy

An exciting thing happened recently here in Sebastian, a brand spanking new Dollar General Store opened up not far from our house. OK you got to get your excitement where you can. So the weekend it opened my wife and I decided to go check it out. My wife who is a school teacher wanted to pick up some supplies and I, well I just didn't have anything better to do so I went with her.

While Sue was picking up pencils and such for her classroom I just sort of wandered around checking out the store, never having been in a Dollar General Store before that I recall. One end cap caught my attention. It was a display of phones-cell phones. There were all types in all price ranges, mostly the very inexpensive ones that you buy and activate by purchasing minutes.

Wow, I thought, I could buy one of those $19.99 phones and have my own private number. Nobody would know that number belonged to me, it would be my little secret. Then I thought what if I got a friend or two or three or maybe a half dozen friends to buy their own secret phones and we exchanged numbers. We could talk to one anther without anyone knowing it, there would be no way anyone would ever know we talked to one another. And when our minutes ran out, or we finished our mission business we could just throw them away and nobody would ever know we talked to one another.

So tell me again why the US Government needs to spend billions to collect all our phone records in order to catch terrorist.