[quote=dboh]Well, first of all, there's no evidence that this pervasive monitoring has any value in stopping terrorists at all. The NSA claims it does, but it sure didn't stop the Boston Marathon attacks, even though the perpetrators were under FBI surveillance, and were on a State Department watch list after being under Russian surveillance, at the time of the attack. If surveillance worked, the Boston bombings should have been a great success story. It wasn't.
I suggest the Boston Marathon bombing was less a failure of surveillance that it was a failure to act on the knowledge gained by the surveillance.
[quote=dboh]If you're looking for that one crucial bit of evidence in a database, it's a whole lot easier to find if the database has 300,000 things in it than if the database has 15,000,000,000 things in it.
I find that a bit misleading when I watch my computer (not the fastest model) conduct millions of checks in short order after a directory rebuild. If the NSA is cross-checking phone numbers from a terrorist phone to phone numbers in their database, I'm sure they have sufficient technological muscle to get their results quickly.
[quote=dboh]Third, fear of terrorism is silly. Really, really silly. Statistically, you are far, far more likely to be struck by lightning six times in a row than you are to be a victim of a terrorist attack.
I'm with dboh on this one: "I am willing to be discomforted or embarrassed by something found in one of my conversations if it will stop someone else from suffering the loss of a loved one in a terrorist attack. It seems somewhat selfish to think otherwise."
We're willing to spend tens of billions of dollars to stop bridges from being blown up by terrorism, when more bridges would be saved if we spent the same amount of money on repairing them in the first place! (This is of particular interest to me personally; the bridge that collapsed in Washington recently is one I drive on whenever I visit my girlfriend in Canada. I have personally driven over it many times.)
The truck that hit that bridge, causing the collapse, had a permit for a load measuring 15.75 feet where the bridge at its lowest point is 14.5 feet. However, there is no sign to tell truckers the lowest point because Washington state law doesn't require posting clearance heights less than 14 feet 5 inches.
That collapse could have been avoided with a few signs.
The Internet and cell phones, historically, has never been where they are most vulnerable. Time after time, in case after case, it isn't surveillance that has revealed terrorist plots before they are carried out. It has been friends and family members of the would-be terrorists talking to law enforcement.
I don't think you can make a blanket statement like that when we don't know the role of surveillance in preventing the dozens of terrorist acts that have not been made public.
Most people are not terrorists. Most Muslims, most radicals, most people are not terrorists.
We agree, and I would add that it's too bad so many people make the leap from some peoples' faith to "must be a terrorist". That leap is also an argument for secrecy so that, when a plot is quashed, the faith of the radical isn't made public.
