"Chances are that your cell phone calls, as well as your home phone calls, have been tracked," said Leslie Cauley, the reporter who broke the story. She said there was a "high likelihood" that this information was being passed on to the FBI and CIA.

The paper reports that three of the nation's largest phone companies - AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth - have been turning over detailed call histories of all their customers since Sept. 11, 2001, to help the NSA compile what they hope will be "the largest database ever assembled in the world."

About 200 million people have had their call records monitored, Cauley said. This means the NSA keeps track of the outgoing and incoming calls, but not the callers' Social Security numbers or addresses.

"This is referred to as data mining. They slice and dice these numbers a thousand different ways," Cauley said. "They analyze patterns. If you're NSA, you look for suspicious patterns."

In all their comments about the eavesdropping program, U.S. officials never revealed that they were involved in this massive collection of telephone data. Instead the president has described the NSA surveillance program this way: "The program applies only to international communications. In other words, one end of the communication must be outside the United States."

The NSA responded to the report with a statement.

"Given the nature of the work we do, it would be irresponsible to comment. Therefore, we have no information to provide," the statement read. "However, it is important to note that the NSA takes its legal responsibility seriously and operates within the law."

Gen. Michael Hayden, the president's pick for the next CIA director, has defended the eavesdropping program, saying it goes after al Qaeda operatives.

"This is targeted and focused," Hayden said. "This is not about intercepting conversations between people in the United States."

Hayden is likely to be grilled on the NSA surveillance programs during his confirmation hearings next week.

According to USA Today, this massive NSA data collection program is used to analyze calling patterns that may be helpful in tracking down terrorists. This part of the spy program does not include listening to or recording Americans' conversations. The data NSA gathers are so private that phone companies would normally face steep fines for divulging the information.

According to USA Today, one phone company, Qwest, has refused to turn over its records, citing legal concerns. So far, the White House has not responded to this report.

In the past, it has told ABC News that the NSA's terrorist surveillance program is within the law, and is essential to keeping Americans safe.

"Qwest had concerns about the legality about handing over customer information without having court warrants," Cauley said. "It wasn't that they wanted to participate."

Jarrett wrote that beginning in January, his office has made a series of requests for the necessary clearances. Those requests were denied Tuesday.

"Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation," wrote Jarrett.

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the terrorist surveillance program "has been subject to extensive oversight both in the executive branch and in Congress from the time of its inception."

Roehrkasse noted the OPR's mission is not to investigate possible wrongdoing in other agencies, but to determine if Justice Department lawyers violated any ethical rules. He declined to comment when asked if the end of the inquiry meant the agency believed its lawyers had handled the wiretapping matter ethically.

Hinchey is one of many House Democrats who have been highly critical of the domestic eavesdropping program first revealed in December. He said lawmakers would push to find out who at the NSA denied the Justice Department lawyers security clearance.

"This administration thinks they can just violate any law they want, and they've created a culture of fear to try to get away with that. It's up to us to stand up to them," said Hinchey.

In February, the OPR announced it would examine the conduct of its own agency's lawyers in the program, though they were not authorized to investigate NSA activities.

Bush's decision to authorize the largest U.S. spy agency to monitor people inside the United States, without warrants, generated a host of questions about the program's legal justification.

The administration has vehemently defended the eavesdropping, saying the NSA's activities were narrowly targeted to intercept international calls and e-mails of Americans and others inside the U.S. with suspected ties to the al-Qaida terror network.

Separately, the Justice Department sought last month to dismiss a federal lawsuit accusing the telephone company AT&T of colluding with the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program.

The lawsuit, brought by an Internet privacy group, does not name the government as a defendant, but the
Department of Justice has sought to quash the lawsuit, saying it threatens to expose government and military secrets.

COPE, and similar telecom legislation offered in the Senate, does nothing to protect the consumer from this transformation of the Internet.

The telecoms are frustrated that commercial Web sites reap unlimited profits while those providing entry to your home for these companies are prevented from fully cashing in. If the new telecom regulations pass without safeguarding net neutrality, the big telecom companies will be able to prioritize the Web for you. They will be free to decide which Web sites get to your computer faster and which ones may take longer - or may not even show up at all.

By giving the telecoms the ability to harness your Web surfing, the government will empower them to shake down the most profitable Web companies. These companies will sell access to you, to Amazon.com, Travelocity.com and even BaltimoreSun.com, etc. What if these companies elect not to pay? Then, when you type in "amazon.com," you might be redirected to barnesandnoble.com, or your lightning-quick DSL Internet service might suddenly move at horse-and-buggy speed.

It might appear that the direct ramifications of this bill are somewhat obscure. Why should you care, if your Internet fee isn't altered? Or if your Web surfing will (possibly) be only minimally disrupted? (The telecoms understand that completely barring access to certain sites - especially the most popular ones - would be counterproductive.)

You should care because any corporate restriction on information gathering directly counters the original purpose of the World Wide Web.

"Universality is essential to the Web," says its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. "It loses its power if there are certain types of things to which you can't link."

If calling up the Web site of your favorite political commentator takes far longer than surfing to a commercial site, the new laws will have a direct impact on the Web's democratic utility. The proposed laws also facilitate future steps toward corporate censorship. Do you think that the telecoms, under the proposed regulations, would make it easy to visit the Web sites of their disgruntled - or possibly striking - employees?

The proposed new rules have received surprisingly sparse media coverage. The new laws have economic, political and social ramifications. There are several explanations for the silence.

The most probable is simply that because the laws have strong bipartisan support in both houses of Congress, they do not appear particularly newsworthy. COPE has been promoted vigorously in the House by both Texas Republican Joe L. Barton and Illinois Democrat Bobby L. Rush. While a few legislators are attempting to preserve net neutrality - most notably Democratic Rep. Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts and Republican Sen. Olympia J. Snowe of Maine - they are clearly outnumbered.

The history of American telecommunications regulation does not offer a promising model for the future of net neutrality. In the late 1800s, Congress approved of Western Union, America's telegraph monopoly, censoring the Associated Press. The 1934 Communications Act resulted in political discussion over the national airwaves being tightly moderated by CBS and NBC.

Most telecom laws are sold to the public as the "natural evolution" of communications technology. Yet there is no truly natural evolution to our telecommunications laws. Only very rarely is regulation completely ordained by physics or technological limits. More commonly, it emerges from the political process. This is news to many Americans unaware of their own media history.

Many people believe the Internet's decentralized structure guarantees that no company or oligopoly could control it. Internet censorship - whether by corporate or state interests - simply sounds impossible. Yet not only is it theoretically possible, but the history of telecommunications regulation tells us it is probable. By the time the telecoms start changing what you see on your screen, it will be too late to complain.

Although originally aimed at 20-somethings interested in independent music, Web sites like MySpace.com, which is owned by News Corp, have attracted an enormous following among middle school students, and cultural theorists say it's not hard to see why.

As the real world is perceived as more dangerous with child abductors lurking on every corner, kids flock online to hang out with friends, express their hopes and dreams and bare their souls with often painful honesty -- mostly unbeknownst to their tech-clumsy parents.

"We have a complete culture of fear," said Danah Boyd, 28, a Ph.D student and social media researcher at the University of California Berkeley. "Kids really have no place where they are not under constant surveillance."

Driven to and from school, chaperoned at parties and often lacking public transport, today's middle-class American kids are no longer free to hang out unsupervised at the park, the bowling alley or to bike around the neighborhood they way they did 20 years ago.


"A lot of that coming-of-age stuff in public is gone. So kids are creating social spaces within all this controlled space," said Boyd.

LIFE SUPPORT

The ranks of Santa Monica, California-based MySpace.com has swollen to more than 73 million members in two years, making it the second-biggest Web domain after Yahoo in terms of page views. Other popular teen sites are Friendster.com, Tagged.com, Xanga.com and Orkut.com.

Most MySpace members live in the United States but a British version was launched this year and Australia will be next.

More than half of 15- to 20-year-olds who are online are using MySpace, according to the company's research. They use the site's design technology to create personal "spaces" that resemble a cross between a high school locker and a secret diary.

Researchers say older teens and 20-somethings use the site more for friendship, sharing music and arranging meetings and parties.

The younger set use it to chill with known friends and work out their own identity. Some construct fantasy lives of vast wages, luxury cars and say they are searching for "live-in pimps." Others confess touchingly to being geeks, loving uncool movies like "The Sound of Music" or list their puppy as their lover.

"Building identity is a lot of what a teen-ager is. The majority feel they don't fit in," said networking consultant Ross Dawson, chairman of Future Exploration Network.

"This is the first generation for which it is entirely natural to socialize in a digital environment. Mobile phones, instant messaging, texting and being online really are their life support," Dawson said.

ADULT ALARM

Under-14s are not supposed to use MySpace but tens of thousands ignore that stipulation, inventing ages and high school careers still beyond their reach, and sometimes posting sexually precocious pictures.

To meet concern over possible sexual exploitation of children, MySpace hired a safety czar in April and requires under-18s to review safety tips before registering. It also restricts the profiles of under-16s to users they know.

It says it has deleted more than 250,000 profiles of under-14-year-olds since 2004 on the basis of tips by parents and algorithms that search the site looking for keywords and phrases that identify very young users.

"We are now deleting something like 5,000 under-age profiles a day," said Shawn Gold, head of marketing for MySpace.

Gold said the dangers should be kept in perspective. "If MySpace were a state it would be twice the size of California, but the crime associated with it would be a five-block area of New York City."

For all the adult alarm over the coarse language and provocative poses often seen on such sites, Boyd said teens are doing just what they have always done.

"Adults are not normally privy to these teen-age expressions. But when teens hang out in public they do these stupid things and they always have.

"Teens are trying to figure out their sexuality for better or worse. It's a problem for parents to pretend like it doesn't exist. If parents have an open mind and can hear their teens expressing themselves in all their ridiculousness, they can make sense of it and it stops being so scary," she said.

Born in Virginia, the son of a NASA technician, Kelly made his feature debut in 2001 with the black comedy Donnie Darko, starring Jake Gyllenhaal. His latest picture, Southland Tales, is set in a dystopian Los Angeles paralysed by economic and environmental collapse. Ironically, the film is implicitly concerned with security measures taken by the US government after the events of September 11 2001.

"The paranoid conspiracy freak inside me is starting to think this has something to do with the film," Kelly admitted yesterday. In the meantime he has enlisted his mother to hunt for documents that prove his American citizenship.

The Cannes film festival runs May 17-28.

He said prisoners in the Cuban military base had access to judicial review and there was a "process" for trying to move people through the camp.

In a speech in London last night, Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, said Guantánamo was a "symbol of injustice" and should be shut down.

"It is time, in my view, that it should close," he said. "Not only would it, in my personal opinion, be right to close Guantánamo as a matter of principle, I believe it would also help to remove what has become a symbol to many - right or wrong - of injustice."

As the British government's highest-ranking official in legal issues, Lord Goldsmith's opinions carry considerable weight.

He was careful to stress that his remarks were personal views rather than those of the government, but they are the strongest British condemnation of Guantánamo yet.

Tony Blair has not gone beyond describing the camp as an "anomaly", and the former foreign secretary Jack Straw echoed the US line of looking forward to an unspecified date when the camp would be able to close.

Mr McCormack yesterday said detainees were being sent back to their home countries so long as the US was confident they wouldn't "go in the front door and head out the back".

"The president has talked about the fact that we'd like nothing better than at some point in the future to close down Guantánamo," he said. Nobody wants to be a jailer for the world."

Four British citizens held at the camp were released without charge last January.

Last week, the high court ruled that the government was not obliged to lobby for the release of two British residents detained at Guantánamo.

Appeals over the rights of Australian inmate David Hicks to British citizenship are ongoing.

Around 750 people have passed through the camp since it opened in 2002.

Last month, US reporters acquired a list of around three-quarters of the detainees, the majority of whom came from Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

Police, customs and immigration enforcement agents also detained 528 illegal immigrants in the crackdown along the border of Arizona, the biggest U.S. entry point for illegal immigrants coming across the U.S.-Mexican border.

A total of 11 weapons, 62 vehicles and six real estate locations valued at 1.7 million dollars were seized. Some 4.8 million dollars in cash, 5 kg of cocaine and more than 1 kg of marijuana were also found in the operation.

Authorities said those arrested ranged from members of small-time organizations to operators of criminal syndicates who make money bringing mostly Mexican immigrants across the desert.

Arizona passed a state law that makes human smuggling, already a federal felony in the U.S., a state crime last August.