WaPo:

A majority of Americans initially support a controversial National Security Agency program to collect information on telephone calls made in the United States in an effort to identify and investigate potential terrorist threats, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The new survey found that 63 percent of Americans said they found the NSA program to be an acceptable way to investigate terrorism…

Presumably these 63% of Americans are assuming that the NSA domestic calls database helps to fight terrorism in some specific, well defined manner, even if the government for obvious reasons cannot explain to us how it all works. But think about this for a moment. Here’s how the program is described:

USA Today disclosed in its Thursday editions the existence of the massive domestic intelligence-gathering program. The effort began soon after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Since then, the agency began collecting call records on tens of millions of personal and business telephone calls made in the United States. Agency personnel reportedly analyze those records to identify suspicious calling patterns but do not listen in on or record individual telephone conversations.

Going by what has been revealed of the program at this point, the database does not include the identity of a caller or of the person called. It contains both phone numbers, and the time and duration of each call. If that’s all you can look at, what on earth would constitute a suspicious calling pattern?

If person X calls the same person too often?

If person X has too many long calls?

If person X makes calls at odd hours of the day?

If person X makes too many long calls to the same person at odd hours of the day?

See what I mean? The only suspicious pattern I can see is that there doesn’t seem to be any good definition of a suspicious calling pattern. Almost anything you posit would trawl up so many innocent people as to be absolutely useless as an analytic tool.

The natural suspicion is that this is just one vast fishing expedition. They have no idea what they’re looking for. It’s not even clear that there’s anything to be found. But they’re collecting the data anyway, and then slicing and dicing it every which way just to see if something somehow pops up.

That seems to me to be entirely too tenuous a justification for assembling such a chillingly 1984-esque database. But maybe it’s just me. Maybe a majority of Americans would support it anyway, even if they believed the possible benefit to be so thin and tenuous?