Time & Perspective Quote by Margaret Carlson

“On his own okay” is doing the real work here. Carlson isn’t just reporting that Bush authorized surveillance; she’s framing it as a solo act, a kind of executive self-licensing that quietly dissolves the checks people assume are in place. The phrase has a faintly schoolyard sarcasm to it, but it lands because it captures a post-9/11 governing style that often treated oversight as a nuisance to be managed rather than a constraint to be honored.

The sentence is built like a trapdoor: it starts with the casual, almost shrugging permission slip (“on his own okay”), then drops you into the hard nouns that carry moral weight in American political life: “authorized,” “eavesdropping,” “purely domestic.” The number “as many as a thousand” is calibrated too. It’s big enough to feel systemic, small enough to invite the defense that it’s targeted and restrained. That ambiguity is the point: Carlson is highlighting how the public gets asked to tolerate surveillance without being given the information needed to judge it.

Context matters: this arrives in the era of the New York Times’ reporting on the NSA warrantless wiretapping program, when the line between foreign intelligence and domestic privacy was being rhetorically blurred. Carlson’s subtext is that the most alarming part isn’t the technology; it’s the precedent. If “okay” can be self-issued, then legality becomes a mood, and the citizen’s role shrinks to finding out after the fact what power decided it needed.