Matt's post on the potential real world results of relatively small margins of error in a hypothetical NSA data mining algorithm is very much worth your time. As he shows, tiny inaccuracies will ensure the government's net traps large majorities of innocents. The question, then, is what next. And that's why so many of us liberal moonbats are in such high dudgeon. Let's go through a bit of what we don't know here:
The Algorithm: Is it useful? How is it targeted? What percentage of its results are false positives? How effectively are we able to process the true positives and put them on the correct desks?
Now, granted, we can't simply release the details on Slashdot and let the distributed intelligence of the net do it's work, but neither is it true there's no way to create some oversight here. Convene a panel of eminent computer scientists and mathematicians from MIT and CalTech, fully brief them on the program, and have them report back to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the House Intelligence Committee, and the congressional leadership. Or, better yet, convene a bipartisan committee led by, say, Sam Nunn, and have the scientists report to them. Let the panel speak to experts, evaluate the program, and release one classified report to the Senate and a more generalized report publicly.
The Suspects: What happens to them? As Matt wonders, are we then tossing them in for "coercive interrogations," creating endless false confessions and a grand unified theory that encompasses both torture and surveillance? How do we catch mistakes? Who evaluates them? Does each positive result get turned over to FISA? Why don't we create a panel specifically meant to separate the wheat from the chafe? Why isn't there some oversight body keeping track of the whole process, from suspicion to wrongful incarceration?
Why? I'm not necessarily against a program of this sort if properly executed, but why is it such high priority? Bush keeps mentioning how we needed to "connect the dots." Only problem is, he doesn't seem to understand the phrase. Pre 9/11, the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, the FAA, and a variety of other groups had collected isolated bits of information and surveillance that, if laid out on the same desk, would've laid out the 9/11 plot in considerable detail. We had FBI officials noticing the Al-Qaeda members in flight school, NSA intercepts calling 9/11 "zero day," agents theorizing that hijacked planes would be turned to missiles, and so forth. But none of that mattered. Because while we had the dots, we lacked the ability to connect them.
At best, this NSA program collects tons more dots, but are we connecting them? Do we have the ability to process this much information? Or are we dangerously decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio? In short, why is this program necessary? We had the intelligence under the old protocols, we just didn't process it. Why is the answer more data and why should we be confident that the government has the resources to sift through it?
