I guess we could quibble about Wilson's actions in WWI: he nationalized the phone and radio companies. Bushco didn't nationalize them: if they didn't go along with TSP then the president of the telco could land in jail (see Qwest). I call that nationalization by stealth.

Yeah they had AWESOME "electronic communications" to collect in WW1. Morse code??

Why any institution of higher learning would allow a bag of cr*p like gonzo to set foot on its campus, let alone speak to students, is just mind boggling.

Even if what Gonzales said was fundamentally true, "massive" and "narrow" do not involve different statuses of the same comparator. An information quest can be both "massive" and "narrow," the former referring to the extent of the request and the latter referring to the scope of the request. Thus, Gonzales is being stupid, disingenuous (in making a non-comparing comparison - sorta like a non-denial denial?), or both.

More to the point, the laws that Bush was subject to and was duty-bound to uphold are quite different than the laws that Roosevelt and Wilson were bound by, excluding any constitutional considerations and current views of that document.

Finally, Gonzales casually (and dishonestly) leaves out "domestic" in making the false comparison, not to mention that no matter how massive Roosevelt's and Wilson's collection efforts were, there mere expansion of electronic data and the number of people engaged in electronic transmissions makes his statement patently false in all respects, no matter how he could or has structured it.

Well, at least he dropped Presidents Washington and Lincoln from the list of Presidents that have conducted the widespread electronic surveillance. I am not kidding. At one point he actually told a Senate committee that Washington and Lincoln did this too. Here's the link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MWC0rj4DTQ

When testifying before congress, Gonzo can't seem to recall what he had for breakfast. Yet somehow he knows what happened in WW-I and WW-II, before he was born.