In my bygone youth - say, two or three years ago - I argued with ground level enthusiasts for all things Bush by using words like 'counter-constitutional' or 'violation of privacy'.
That went nowhere fast with the typical response being 'I'll give up some freedoms to stay safe'.
After a while, it occurred to me that a better way was to question effectiveness: sure Mr. Nervous American, you may think listening to everyone's phone calls will catch terrorists but let's sit down with a pitcher of beer, a legal pad, a pen, and a will to work through a deep analysis of how real systems behave in this messy world.
Better results all around.
Fortunately, greater minds than my own are doing the same thing.
For example:
from Ars Technica at
<http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051220-5808.html/>
The new technology at the root of the NSA wiretap scandal
12/20/2005 12:38:54 PM, by Hannibal
When the NSA wiretapping story first hit the pages of the NYT a few days ago, there were clearly a huge number of unanswered questions. Is the wiretapping that the President has authorized illegal under the FISA act? Is it unconstitutional? If it's illegal, does the President have the authority to violate the law if he's acting in the best interests of the republic? And then there's the question of why the NYT sat on this story for over a year before going public with it.
I'm not really going to make any attempt to answer questions of legality and constitutionality, because the Internet is full of armchair constitutional scholars right now who're fighting tooth and nail over these questions, generating much heat but very little light. Instead, I'd like to point your attention to some later developments in this case that clearly indicate that there's much more going on here than we initially assumed. When the truth comes out (if it ever does), this NSA wiretapping story will almost certainly be a story not just about the Constitutional concept of the separation of powers, but about high technology.
<snip>
But aside from my general knee-jerk anti-government reactions against this program, there's an even deeper criticism that can be leveled against casting such a wide, computer-automated net. The problem is not that such large-scale industrial fishing invariably catches a few dolphins along with the tuna, but that between 99.999 and 100 percent of what you're going to get is dolphin.
Just imagine, for a moment, that 0.1% of all the calls that go through this system score hits. Now let's suppose the system processes 2 million calls a day. That's still 2,000 calls a day that the feds will want to eavesdrop on—a very high number, and still much higher than any courts could possibly oversee. Furthermore, only a miniscule fraction of the overall total of 2 million calls per day on only a few days of each month will contain any information of genuine interest to the feds, and the odds that some of those calls will be among those that catch the governments interest are passing slim.
[...]
full at -
<http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051220-5808.html/>
.d.