Chris At Home

Mark isn't happy and for good reason:

Fifteen out of 19 of the 9/11 killers were citizens of Saudi Arabia. So let's scrap the tens of millions of law-abiding phone records, and say we only want to examine the long-distance phone bills of, say, young men of Saudi origin living in the United States. Can you imagine what Leahy and Lauer would say to that? Oh, no! Racial profiling! The government's snooping on people whose only crime is "dialing while Arab." In a country whose Transportation Security Administration personnel recently pulled Daniel Brown off the plane as a security threat because he had traces of gunpowder on his boots -- he was a uniformed U.S. Marine on his way home from Iraq -- in such a culture any security measure will involve "tens of millions of Americans": again by definition, if one can't profile on the basis of religion or national origin or any other identifying mark with identity-group grievance potential, every program will have to be at least nominally universal.

He makes an excellent point about defenders of NSA surveillance. Those who want the government to monitor international calls from suspected terrorists, to use data mining to identify possible threats, those who are outraged that the New York Times constantly leaks information about our intelligence gathering efforts, are people who most distrust the government. We don't defend the programs because we believe the government should have information about our lives, we defend these programs because they are the only way to protect the country from the next terrorist attack.

Those people who believe in a big government providing cradle to grave protection and intervention in our lives are those most upset at existence of the program.

More on the program here.

Update: Read this to get your daily dose of irony. NSA head is slammed for killing program which might have identified hijackers because NSA lawyers weren't sure if it was legal to monitor phone calls (pre-Patriot Act).

Update: 700 terrorists at large in Britain, according to MI-5 and MI-6. They know because of wiretaps.