Two Pennies, From Me to You

If you didn’t see it yesterday, The Baron du Toit posted some inside baseball about data mining in relation to the donnybrook over the NSA thumbing through phone number data.

The standard “Read the Whole Thing” line applies to said post. You can read it and come back to get my two cents or read and then go. Also make sure you read at least the fifth comment to the post by Staff Martin.

While the idea of my government, whom I have learned never to trust, no matter what, knowing the traffic going in and out of my phone does bother me, as did the thought of the Fed tapping international phone calls. But it doesn’t bother me as much as the fact that there are people already in my country, waiting to get a sign from whomever to light themselves off in a shopping mall so that they can kill me for not converting to their back-asswards religion.

And let us not forget, that if we had nipped this problem in the ass, say, in the mid to late 70’s, we wouldn’t have the problem we do today, and none of this would be necessary. There is something to be said for overwhelming force, early on in the process.

From everything I have seen, read and heard, the feds having the numbers, the in/out calls for those numbers, the length of the call and time of the call, is not illegal, because a separate search must be made in order to find the owner of that number. Not that that makes me feel any better about it.

One distinction I would like to make between the The Baron’s comparison and the Feds is that Kroger can’t come to my house to arrest me.

But that aside, I have also been reading the left wing blog sites and sporadically listening to Airhead America radio since this hit and one thing they all keep saying is that “No one has been caught using information found during the data mining”. They seem to feel safe in saying this because they believe that the Bush Administration would have paraded around whomever they caught with this program while telling us how they caught them.

I know liberalism is a disorder, but can it really make people that damn stupid? A multi-billion dollar program, down the drain after it’s first arrest and capture so that the NSA can make themselves look good? Excuse, but if they caught one person with it, that proves to them that it is successful and that they’ll probably catch ten, twenty or fifty more via this program. They’re not going to talk about it; that is their job, to be secretive.

The leftists said the same thing about the tapping of international calls. Their point went down the crapper after it was found out that the sleeper cell out of Oregon was discovered when one member, at an Al-Qiada training camp in Pakistan, called one of the other members, a recent graduate of the same camp, in the US and was picked up by the international call tap.

I also find it odd that this story broke, on a program going on since 2002, right before the confirmation hearings for General Hayden. As it is well known, the NSA and the CIA don’t exactly get along, and I’m wondering if someone was pissed off that Hayden was leaving the NSA to go work for TBAR (Those Bastards Across the River).

What I would truly find funny is if this was another “Torture Prison’s in Europe” story, used to flush out another traitor working in national intelligence.