Because, even if YOU aren’t discussing terrorism with the terrorist, sooner or later, the terrorist will discuss it with SOMEONE -- we are trying to prevent the next 9/11 attack. How are we supposed to listen in ONLY when we know that attack is going to be discussed? Besides, Greg in FL says there's a silver lining so you have nothing to worry about anyways. Worse case scenario, the next COMPETENT Administration will be able to track down every person the next 9/11 terrorists spoke with. That's not bad, is it?

P.S. Kitt – I’m not advocating genocide and, yes, I do have children AND grandchildren who I want to live in a safer world, just like you do. We simply disagree on how to get there. Can you answer my question now: you don’t think the ROBERTS Supreme Court would uphold empounding every Arab-American or otherwise suspected terrorist in the meantime?

If you and your precious Bush Administration cannot prove that you are on the optimal curve, then any scary scenarios that pretend that we need to give up civil liberties, or openness as you call it, are demagogery and unnecessary treasons against a free society.

In fact, there is STRONG evidence that these types of programs are completely useless for real security:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/rudmin1.html

Not only does the Administration fail to make any case for the effectiveness of their program, a generalized analysis suggests that their program is almost certainly a waste of money, simply due to the expected ratio of positives and negatives and the fact that they cannot be identified perfectly accurately.

If you conduct the same analysis on these kinds of data mining programs, except supposing the goal is to track political opponents, you will find that the system is VERY effective at that!

So:

1) administration sets up data mining program almost certainly useless for catching terrorists

2) once in place, such a program is excellent at identifying borad demographic blocks, such as political alignment

3) the administration REFUSES to justify the program except with the words "it ketches terrists!" or allow any public oversight

4) Q.E.D., what do you think the program is FOR?

shooter: Moussaoui's laptop was kept closed because of difficulty fulfilling then FISA requirements, and you know what happened next.

Actually, Moussaoui's computer was kept closed because of the incompetence of the DOJ:

The frantic efforts of Minnesota FBI agents to search the computer and belongings of suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui in August 2001 were thwarted by lawyers at FBI headquarters who misunderstood the law on foreign intelligence surveillance warrants, a congressional committee was told yesterday.
"Had the agents succeeded in obtaining a special intelligence warrant in the weeks leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks, they would have found materials that could have led them to al Qaeda members -- including hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi -- who had gathered for a key meeting in Malaysia in January 2000," Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), a member of the panel, said yesterday.
The lawyers worked for the F.B.I.'s National Security Law Center. The Congressional committee report says that they "advised FBI counterterrorism officials that agents did not have enough evidence to seek an FISA warrant." One of the lawyers said that Moussaoui would have to be linked to a "recognized" foreign power, which the committee staff's report called "a misunderstanding of FISA."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62612-2002Sep24.html

There was no difficulty fulfilling the FISA requirements. The FBI/DOJ lawyers didn't know what the FISA requirements were. All the requirements for a FISA warrant were met but the FBI lawyers refused to apply for one because they didn't understand the law and didn't know know what the requirements were. And you know what happened next. Please, shooter, basing your concept of "the real world" on Rush Limbaugh is not a sound policy.

If the Bush Administration handles it's illegal surveillance operations with the same level of competence that it has shown in all of it's other endeavors, maybe we don't have so much to worry about.

I am surprised that there haven't been more breakdowns in the system so far. After all, at some point all this electronic monitoring gets distilled down to where humans step in and read the information. People at NSA are smart enough to realize that they can end up in jail under some future administration when all the dirty laundry finally sees the light of day. There's got to be tremendous pressure on some of these people to keep towing the line. At some point, somebody's going to crack.

Congress now seems to me to be at fault not for failing to investigate but for being complicit in denying citizens information both on the program itself and on the congressional oversight of it.Lisa S.

For the very simple reason that if one chooses to weight openess over security, one has to admit to choosing "acceptable" numbers of deaths over doing everything possible to limit those deaths. In other words, Democrats have no plan "B", just criticisms of Plan "A".shooter242

Just a comment on the point of vigilance in defending freedom: Lisa S. is correct that Congress is complicit in the information dearth, but not quite damning enough. Congress is complicit for not stopping the programs. Congressional oversight, media outrage, and public response forced the Bush administration to terminate the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program run by Iran-Contra criminal John Poindexter.

But that didn't do what people thought oversight and public attention thought it would do: stop the abuse. What happened next was that the Bush Administration opened up the TALON program in the Defense Department, a seemingly less intrusive program, which then got intrusive, got reported on in January, and the DOD announced that it too would shut down. Just keep one step ahead and we keep them out of surveillance, right?

Not exactly. When brought to public attention in January TALON was already plenty abusive. But it is, in some respects, a diversion. Because what really happened is that the Bush Administration went looking for someplace to put TIA, and found a willing client in the intelligence services of Singapore. They grew and expanded the TIA in Singapore, under direction of some of America's biggest defense contractors (Boeing, Lockheed, etc.) and others, and American "advisors". Suddenly, last week, news breaks that the NSA has been engaged in really big domestic data mining, and has constructed the largest database in the history of the planet, mostly consisting of data on American citizens (looking for the link, I saw it in the paper in the past week). I guess we can console ourselves that a high-tech business that had offshored to the Far East is now a domestic industry again? Anybody remember this phrase and who was creating it?

Off the shelf, self financing, independent covert operations capability' outside the checks and balances of executive and congressional oversight, for the purpose of...

On to shooter's comment. Ever heard of Lagrange multipliers and optimization shooter? When you have two variables, in this case openness and security, or as us liberals would put it, civil liberties vs. security, it sets up a curve, usually a first-quadrant hyperbola along which moving in one direction increases civil liberties at the expense of security, in the other, increases security at the expense of civil liberties. What most people fail to realize is that the curve is one of a family of such curves, and there is one highest up in the quadrant that marks the curve in which everything has been moved to its maximum efficiency. Along that particular curve (the optimal curve) it is inevitable that any gain in security must be paid for by a decrease in civil liberties and vice versa. Along any other curve in the family, one always has the choice of looking for a way to move closer to the optimal, and so the choice is a phony one. If you and your precious Bush Administration cannot prove that you are on the optimal curve, then any scary scenarios that pretend that we need to give up civil liberties, or openness as you call it, are demagogery and unnecessary treasons against a free society.