The idea that we are like China over the collection of information about wire communications is ridiculous. It is the difference between a program to control your own people (China) and one to keep terrorists from killing us (America).
And the government is revealing some success:
The head of the National Security Agency said on Wednesday that extensive U.S. surveillance efforts had helped stop "dozens" of possible attacks, and warned that making details of the top-secret programs public had compromised national security.
Now, given the IRS and Fast and Furious episodes in particular, I think it is legitimate to worry about whether the NSA program could be abused. So proper oversight is a good point of debate. And I'd like to see the data erased after some reasonable amount of time.
But the program itself seems proper and reasonable. Unless something else comes out, I lean toward giving the Obama administration a break on this.
As an aside, I find it amusing that so many who lament that more Americans aren't suffering from the effects of being at war are so upset about suffering the loss of meta-data as a shared burden of the war effort. It's like they define "suffering" only as increasing taxes to fund non-war related things.
Of course, given that this program is obviously a wartime compromise with our ideals of privacy, I'd appreciate it if the government acted like we're at war and tried to defeat the jihadis so we can scale back the NSA program at some point when the tide of war really does recede.
UPDATE: This is about right (tip to Instapundit):
The case for the National Security Agency's gathering of metadata is: America is threatened not by a nation but by a network, dispersed and largely invisible until made visible by connecting dots. The network cannot help but leave, as we all do daily, a digital trail of cellphone, credit card and Internet uses. The dots are in such data; algorithms connect them. The technological gathering of 300 billion bits of data is less menacing than the gathering of 300 by bureaucrats. Mass gatherings by the executive branch twice receive judicial scrutiny, once concerning phone and Internet usages, another concerning the content of messages.
The case against the NSA is: Lois Lerner and others of her ilk.
I want to trust my government enough to let the NSA protect us. But our government isn't making it easy for me to do so.
UPDATE: Well, the suffering wasn't universal. Thank goodness there are some sanctuaries safe from governmental interest. Tip to Instapundit.
