In addition to the civil liberties and constitutional defects in the new surveillance law, another compelling argument against it is that it only increases the amount of "senseless cacophonies" in America's Library of Babel.

The author does a strange disservice to his point by making his "Library of Babel" analogy so weakly.

The vision of a massive, technology-driven, automated terrorism-detecting computer system does not merely contribute to some vaguely banal nightmare of national "cacophony." It's a menace to the ability of the US to actually protect its interests, because it encourages, or even requires, a passive view of counterespionage.

The NSA wants to be able to type in "find terrorists" and click on "I feel lucky," and have the terrorists pop up. Like countless overreaching security bureaucrats before them, they seem to have convinced themselves that this new toy will replace all the uncertainty, tedium, and pesky legal procedures inherent in actual investigative work.

The reality is that by depending on this new system, which isn't going to "find all the terrorists" any more than all those different intelligent email scanning algorithms "stopped all the spam," the NSA will produce false leads while somehow missing real terrorists, just like any investigative agency does when it throws boring reality to the wind.

Thank-you Mr. Bamford for being on the job! I have several times in various blogs touted your earlier book, The Puzzle Palace, which was terrific. You also write some great footnotes! I'll be reading your new book soon. People do not understand that this surveillance began way back with reading telegraph cables, and the US/British intel sharing, and has never really stopped. Now it is so massive that even Google pales in size. Wake up, America, the NSA knows all your intimate communications.

i doubt they'll vote any better..

employment guarentee at the D.o.D.

anyone read amercian scientist today?

truly interesting stuff v. bores.

that Bush went away. Obama voted for this bill (Glenn Greenwald covered this in detail.)

I marveled at you dispensing with your usual cant in favor of a more casual indifference to the insinuations of the essay in question.

What are the "American interests" you refer to that would be protected by constructing a billion dollar seceret surveillance center in the Utah desert to intercept our emails and phone calls? As you raise no objection to your fellow citizens being surveilled by the NSA who will operate this facility and you fail to suggest any reason to further constrain the body of law that permits them to do so it is logical that your objection to the program would be more likely on grounds of protestant aesthetics or efficiency than principle or legal precident and so it is.

It appears to me that your willingness to abandon our constitutional guarantee of protection from government's practice of unreasonable search and seizure, places you solidly in the class of citizens Benjamin Franklin warned us about.

Those who would give up ESSENTIAL LIBERTY to purchase a little TEMPORARY SAFTEY deserve neither liberty or safety.

R Jackson

For some reason I have no doubt that every phone call, every text message, every phone call within the United States is being recorded by the government - and that the information is already being abused in all sorts of ways.

Eventually, perhaps, evidence of the abuse will surface. I hope that the American people will actually care, and finally take action.

But I doubt it. The last nine years have proved pretty conclusively that the majority of the American people neither understand democracy, nor deserve it.

Collecting data, or screening data, or processing data is not the same as "listening". Published sources indicate that NSA collects a large amount of data, but can analyze only a small amount, some say less than 1% of the data, which still would be a lot. However, even analysis of data is not the same a "listening". The concept of "listening" involves one human being hearing the telephone conversations of another. Pen trap data of your telephone calls does not require a warrant because none of the content is listened to. The NSA time after time has saved the United States from disasters, and you can see this by an examination of its unclassified histories. If people would spend some time studying NSA's history they would see that NSA has done many remarkable things. They would also see that each and every time information about NSA capabilities is leaked out, the source dries up, causing a black out on intelligence, and many times grave damage to US interests.

What are YOU doing, YES, doing TO DESERVE IT?

would be Shadrach in the furnace by Robert Silverberg

so much for "change you can believe in" !!

It sickens me that this country has allowed itself to slip into a proto-fascist police state in the wake of 9/11. Instead of acting rationally and maturely and using the law and the resources at hand, the American people, in a stunning act of cowardice, handed over as many rights as they could for the illusion of safety.

The right to privacy is a fundamental right that all American citizens are entitled to. Idiotic apologists who assert they have "nothing to hide, so they don't mind" completely miss the point of privacy.

The lack of judicial and congressional oversight is particularly troubling- not only with NSA but also with CIA. God knows what kind of crimes they have committed under the auspices of "keeping us safe". Of course, the neutering of the courts is exactly what Bush, Cheney, Gonzales and Yoo wanted. They wanted free reign to act like Neo-Fascists against their own citizens.

I applaud the actions of the ACLU, which I truly believe is an organization that acts as a bulwark against the complete erosion of the freedoms we are granted. However, I cannot help but to be sickened by the fact that our elected officials are not the ones stepping up to the plate on this one. Apparently they could give a damn what laws are broken, and which of their constituents are spied on, just as long as they have unobstructed access to the kickback saturated whorehouse that is now Washington D.C.