Innocent Americans are outraged that their government has been spying on their telephone calls, so what do they do? Sue the phone companies, of course. The lawsuits are a massive indictment of the US political process: Americans do not trust their elected representatives to rein in the government’s costly and misguided programme to monitor every phone call made from every phone in the country, so they are trying to strong-arm the telecommunications companies to fight the battle for them. It might work; but it is a strange way to make public policy.

The American telecoms giants, AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, are facing lawsuits that could cost them billions of dollars, for their alleged complicity with the National Security Agency in a data-mining scheme aimed at compiling a database of American phone calls. AT&T is also facing an earlier lawsuit accusing it of helping the government listen to some Americans’ overseas calls. The data-mining scheme does not involve listening in, however: supposedly the government are just keeping records of which phone called which other phone, and when. The numbers are not connected to names, and no content is included.