You can’t put your own government on trial when the government controls the information necessary to convict. If a private company had tapped the phones of millions of Americans, we could demand the records be turned over to the court and they would have to comply. However, since the NSA did it, they can say that revealing the information would be a danger to national security and therefore should be dropped. That’s just total BS. What can the government NOT get away with?

Here’s a link to the story on CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/05/10/domestic.spying.ap/index.html
And here’s a link to a story on Wired:
http://www.wired.com/news/wireservice/0,70878-0.html?tw=rss.index

I suggest everyone use encryption all the time. You never know what might get you put on a black list or turned into a terrorist ten years from now. It happened to a lot of people durring the red scare and it happened to a lot of people during the terrorism scare.

For phone calls, Skype uses encryption for voice and chat.

Get GPG or PGP and make yourself a keypair to send encrypted emails (those are also monitored by the NSA).
If you don’t know anything about email encryption, you can read a little tutorial I wrote:

http://pgp.shadowpuppet.net