when i said nit-picky i should have referred you to your comment:

“you’ve combined parts of more more [sic] than one thing/amendment in that cheeky phrase…”

i am not at all upset about your correction. in fact, i thanked you for it. however, i do think it’s a waste of time to point out insignificant errors in a comment that someone spends 5 minutes writing. I have spared you the wrath of cite-check/spell-check in your posts, and I only expect the same manners from other persons who post. Homework: what’s the difference between reigns and reins?

I’ll admit to have been nitpicking back in my days of losing sleep (heh) over Doug’s labelling AG as a “dumb tool,” but I don’t think it’s overzealous to note that the entire premise of someone’s argument is incorrect. Criticism of the NSA would be a lot more credible to me if the Constitution really did contain prohibitions like the post said. Violating statutes is not good, but, in my opinion, violating the Constitution is much worse. It’s not like I’m lashing out over the failure to dot one’s “i’s.” A person can’t just throw around false information–and do so with a funny but snide “last time I checked” kind of line–and then get upset when corrected. Well, unless the person is a Democrat (or so it seems judging by MSM coverage). Lame.

I’m not sure your suggestion to stop by the WaPo first counts as a rebuttal, but I appreciate it nonetheless. Were I actually anyone important, I’d certainly do my best to spread the word. I mentioned USA Today only because some of the quotes in one of the post to which I was responding were published in that “newspaper.”

Doug, I see your point that your opposition to this program doesn’t necessarily hinge on its constitutionality. You just think its bad policy. Pre-9/11, I probably would have agreed with you, too. That said, I consider myself a limited-government conservative who also accepts and supports the government when it’s carrying out its proper duties. Unlike, say, nationalized healthcare, preventing terrorist attacks seems to fit the bill. It’s important to separate necessary government functions with inappropriate overreaching into individual freedom.

You say you’re on board with the government tapping into known terrorists’ communication networks, just not the rest of us. How exactly is that supposed to work? Isn’t it a little naive to think such a distinction would be that simple? Granted, I’m sure Al Queda’s not the most sophisticated group, but not all of its operatives are going to do us the favor of looking like a terrorist. Would that it were. It’d be nice it were as simple as the plot of Team America.

The government failed us on 9/11 in many respects, which is all the more reason for us not to restrict the tools that actually assist in preventing future attacks. The Patriot Act, for example, which solved many of those bureacratic problems you mentioned, has also been derided for the same reasons you now deride this NSA program.

Like you, I don’t trust the government (at least not in performing functions it was not meant to perform), but I also don’t trust the vast majority of politicians who are against this program either. Sure, conservatives are prone to suspect any expansion of government power, but it doesn’t follow that we categorically have to reject all expansions; our nomenclature isn’t meant to signal that kind of approach. Rather, we can suspect, then evaluate and act decide accordingly. Given the choice between the two sides in this debate, I’ll place my trust in the one that authorized the NSA. I know they’re not the equivalent of Jack Bauer–who is?–but they’re as good as we’ve got and seem to be doing a pretty good job. It’s very possible that programs like the one we’re discussing have contributed to AQ’s inability to strike the homeland over the past 5 years.

You’re right that the possibility for abuse exists, yet you’re merely repeating one of the truest of truisms. The possibility of a slippery slope will almost always exist. It’s part of the struggle between order and liberty that has challenged this country from the beginning, consistently requiring us to struggle for the right balance. As I mentioned, a few years ago I would’ve agreed with you that the NSA is on the wrong side of the line. Not anymore. Why? Well, you explained it best:

“…that is how most people weight policy. They analyze whether the policy is good/bad/effective/useless, etc. utilizing criteria that they believe to be important and relevent. In the end, the policy can “make sense” to implement or not.”

To me it makes sense. Which reminds me of my earlier question: Where has the common sense of All Encompassingly gone?

You are correct that the issue is not one of constitutionality. Thank you [swallowing pride] for the clarification. I learned something new. However, it seems your nit-pickiness knows no ends, forcing me to rebut at least part of your argument: your first stop to for information regarding this issue in the coming weeks should not be USA Today. Try The Washington Post instead.

Well, bnice, if you were part of Al-Quaeda–and I’m not saying that you are…or that you aren’t–then I’d be glad the authorities were checking your phone records, whether they paid for them or not. I’d hope they’d be checking your internet records, too.

Heh. I don’t think bnice would quibble with you. I know I wouldn’t. But this is exactly the point, Scruff. The government is analyzing the phone records of millions of Americans, not just those who are affiliated with al-Qaeda.

In essence, you have reinforced my argument. If the government is tracking a (suspected) terrorist, more power to them! They should look at everything the (suspected) terrorist is doing: phone records, internet records, travel records, library records, etc.

This, however, is not what is happening with the NSA data mining millions of phone records. Hence, bnice’s comment.

From LDS Patriot:

The program allowing the NSA to collect phone records for analysis was passed into law in 1994 by Clinton.

I have no idea this is true, either way, I still find the program unpalatable.

It’s fully constitutional, 100% legal, and a none issue.

Perhaps, but I still think it is wrong and a waste of government resources in the fight against terrorism.

However, what is being done with the data is yet to be determined.

Aye, there’s the rub.

From Scruff:

…the salient question seems to be Where has the common sense of All Encompassingly gone?

We disagree as to what common sense consists of.

From my point of view, the government is correct to monitor calls to and from (suspected) terrorists living overseas. I think they step beyond their bounds once they start collecting the phone records of millions of Americans and data mining them. The possibility of abuse is enormous.

And then Scruff, quoting Bill Buckley:

“What is happening to George W. Bush is that dissenters are moving from criticism of him to just plain hostility to him. Swings in the public mood that emphatic aren’t unknown to American history, though these days they are more lacerating because of the diurnal polls that give lapidary attention to wisps of sentiment.”

The funny thing is…I didn’t mention Bush in my post at all. I simply took issue with a policy that an executive branch agency is carrying out (even mentioning my support of a similar policy from the same agency).

I have no hostility towards Bush, but I don’t think that the man is deity. Like you and I, he is certainly capable of serious error and gross misjudgment.

And from travis:

i think you are having all of these daily kos-esque outbursts lately because you are starting to think nestor kirchner and george bush are the same person, and argentina and the US are facing the same domestic issues.

If Nestor Kirchner were collecting the phone records of millions of Argentines in the name of “national security” I would also find it wrong. The fact is, these sort of sweeping “soft invasions” of privacy, are something that I would expect from Hugo Chavez, not George Bush.

It is all fine and good that the NSA may be using the information in ways that we are “comfortable with” right now. But what about tomorrow? Or next year? Or in 2009 when President Hillary Rodham “I have your FBI file AND phone records” Clinton is sworn in?

I don’t trust the government. Limited government conservatives, as the very nomenclature would suggest, should be suspect of any expansion of government power.

And Maggie:

You “heartily support” the earlier eavesdropping because the policy “seems to make complete sense”???

Yeah. I’m guessing that is how most people weight policy. They analyze whether the policy is good/bad/effective/useless, etc. utilizing criteria that they believe to be important and relevent. In the end, the policy can “make sense” to implement or not.

This blog is the perfect example of how partisan politics has allowed every idiot to have strong opinions on just about anything.

Perhaps, although our comments section appear to serve the same purpose.

And finally, bnice.

I think it’s important to clarify something that implicit in bnice’s argument. We hold the government to a different standard. The government is not a private citizen or a business. The government has the power to tax, imprison, and even kill. Hence, we make the government jump through all sorts of hoops in law enforcement, such as obtaining warrants, subpoenas, etc.

What I find most troubling is that all this NSA stuff is being done in the name of “national security” when the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented simply by less bureaucracy. We already had all the pertinent information pre-9/11. The government, “pre-Patriot Act” and “pre-NSA monitoring”, was able to assemble an amazing amount of data on Atta and the other hijackers.

Yet what we have now is a neverending expansion of executive power and an even larger national security bureaucracy. This trend does not give us a better chance at catching terrorists, but instead provides more scenarios for government abuse of power.