"I'm certainly no technical expert, but I find it really hard to believe that collecting such a staggering horde - 2 trillion call records since 2001 - will yield useful intelligence about a relatively small and increasingly amorphous newtork of clandestine operatives who by now have almost certainly learned not to use the phones. We've already had FBI agents complain about being bombarded with false leads, and now experts in the very kind of network analysis the NSA program is supposed to be doing are saying the same thing:"

"If you're looking for a needle, making the haystack bigger is counterintuitive. It just doesn't make sense."

"However, it definitely doesn't take much imagination to see how handy a database like that could be to a bunch of would-be police state captains - for everything from political dirty tricks to tracing the phone calls of suspected whistleblowers and reporters. In fact, it doesn't take any imagination at all, not when the RNC, the Justice Department and the CIA are already doing just those things."

Billmon

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Posted by: Jay Tea at May 15, 2006 04:22 AM