Maggie's Farm

I am shocked - shocked!  The sudden phony shock and alarm about NSA phone data-mining is a nice bit of acting, but congress has known about it for years, and the whole story was reported earlier by the NYT, as seen here.

Is it constitutional to data-mine phone records in search of suspicious international calling patterns? I don't know, but the laws are on the books - Calif Conservative lists them. I can easily see its potential usefulness: it's like taking a CAT scan of the nation, to find a tumor. There really is no other way to try to do it, and our phone records are not secret or confidential - but their content is, so wiretapping is another matter.

However, effectiveness is no justification for unconstitutional acts: only in love and war can the ends possibly justify the means. (It's a shame that the Supreme Court forgot that principle over the past 30 years.)

So I suspect that how people feel about all this depends on whether they view us as being in a war or not - a war against Jihad, but an unconventional war with a pre-industrial people, which requires that Jihad plant organizations within the US. Is this crime, or war? You tell me. It might be a matter of semantics, but to me, it's a kind of war.

If anyone wants the NSA to stop doing this, they should speak up and say so. I trust the NSA not to mis-use their data, but I still do not like the idea.

My plan: let no-one into the US unless properly vetted and checked, and find and kill the terrorists, and then quit this operation.