Thoughts on NSA Data Collection

I am almost always protective of any one's rights as an individual.  However, I am not disturbed by the NSA's collection of phone and internet data.  In those million's of bites of data, I have no fear of the specifics of my phone call with Marti being revealed to anyone.  They are not listening to all those calls.  All that is being recorded is that I called Marti and spoke with him for 20 minutes.

Now if Marti is in the tribal lands of Pakistan and I spoke with him for 60 minutes 5 times last week, I don't have a problem with the authorities tracking me down to find out what I am up.  Furthermore, the only way they will do that, since the cell phone is probably registered in Karachi, is if they find the call in Pakistani intelligence gathering and look for data in the data base to see who called it.  My rights have yet to be violated and I think the country is a whole lot safer.

None of this is perfect.  Things still happen or started to happen and were stopped.  In fact, one person was arrested after his email to a bomb maker in Pakistan was uncovered by monitoring the bomb maker's email account.  The Press long ago established the goal of all citizens being protected.  If editorial writers want to question this policy, they should start with whether perfection in citizen protection is a worthwhile or an achievable realistic goal. When they question NSA data gathering, they should remind their readers that perfection in anti-terrorist detection is near impossible and we still have to do a lot of things right to be even mostly successful in finding terrorists.

I feel safer knowing the NSA is doing what they are, but I know risks still exist and all we can do is live with that.