NSA surveillance = data mining

Much has been written about the secret NSA program to illegally spy on Americans without court oversight. As discussed in numerous media accounts there is a secret court to oversee warrants for wiretaps called FISA, and such requests are almost never turned down. The government can even forge ahead with the warrantless eavesdropping so long as they return to the court to retroactively get permission within 72 hours.

So why would the NSA need to circumvent a standard that is obviously heavily slanted towards the government? Pro-administration media pundits have espoused the "need for speed" in certain situations, claiming that there just isn't time to go to the court to get these warrants. But given the fact that there is a 72-hour grace period where emergency, warrantless wiretaps can be conducted, this need for speed argument just doesn't hold water.

The real reason, rather, is likely that the scope of the program is such that obtaining warrants, which presumably must be done on an individual basis, is not feasible. So this program is really more data mining than anything else. Data mining is where a huge number of communications are electronically monitored simultaneously, and suspicious patterns are sniffed out for further scrutiny. According to the NY Times,

Although the program's public disclosure last month has generated speculation that it may have been used to monitor journalists or politicians, no evidence has emerged to support that idea. Bush administration officials point to a secret audit by the Justice Department last year that reviewed a sampling of security agency interceptions involving Americans and that they said found no documented abuses.

I don't really put too much faith in this administration's power to investigate itself. [Prisoner abuses in military prisons? What abuses? Or better yet, what prisoners?] So should you take some comfort in that it is a computer [initially] violating your privacy rather than a human operator? Absolutely not. I bet we're not talking about a few thousand privacy violations here, we're talking about hundreds of millions of privacy violations. How long before some turns this surveillance tool to another end, such as monitoring public opinion? This isn't a slippery slope we're sliding down, we just went off a cliff.