For all my readers from Columbia to Verona, here are the top stories at this hour:
- US to open direct Taliban talks (BBC) — Seems like our number-one demand in these talks should be that the Taliban stop being the Taliban. But I’m not terribly hopeful of getting a good response on that…
- Putin dashes G8 hopes for Syria talks (The Guardian) — He stands foursquare behind his boy Assad.
- 50 terror plots foiled by surveillance, NSA chief says (WashPost) — For those of you who have been awaiting some examples…
- State finds ‘questionable statistics,’ funding errors, and low board participation in S.C. First Steps review (thestate.com) — Not much to say after that headline of epic proportions. This is about an LAC audit.
- Where’s Jimmy Hoffa? Everywhere And Nowhere (NPR) — This story is actual a sort of step-back thumb-sucker on the subject. For an update on the actual news story, see this from Reuters.
- Obama May Be Ready To Let Bernanke Go (WSJ) — Yikes! Maybe our fellow South Carolinian can get his old job at South of the Border back…
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“50 terror plots foiled by surveillance, NSA chief says (”
Neither of the two incidents detailed were a result of data mining. Both were based on tips.
Why wouldn’t either have been possible with a direct subpoena of cellphone records?
Because cellphone providers don’t keep these records, according to someone on NPR. The government has to.
Re #3: It’s good that the American public is getting more substantive information on which to make a judgment about how far we want to go with surveillance/metadata-gathering in the interest of national security. However, the difficult question that is really at the core of the issue (which has never been truly wrestled with at a national level) is not whether these programs yield some positive results. If they didn’t, the debate would be an easy one, over in a second: the program yields nothing and invades privacy, let’s junk it. But that’s not the case.
What we have to decide as a nation is this: if this kind of data-gathering foiled 50 plots, would more invasive policies, a more profound expansion of the “surveillance state” foil even more? Or, to flip the question another way, say the current array of policies allow only one fairly major terror attack and perhaps a couple of smaller ones to occur on US soil every 10 years or so…wouldn’t deeper and wider surveillance reduce that to every 20 years perhaps? The point is that the American people have to come to a consensus (but a conscious one, arrived at after the kind of debate we’re beginning to have) about where those lines are drawn.
So, again, it’s not that we don’t know these programs have some effect in thwarting terrorist plots. The question we must pose to ourselves is one that acknowledges that fact, but requires a much more cold-blooded, unemotional cost-benefit assessment.
Now that the State House produced its budget and awaits Nikki Haley’s vetoes, why doesn’t someone contact wannabe Governor Vincent Sheheen and ask him to take HIS red pen to the budget and tell us what he would veto.
Call it a job interview question… is he up to the task or afraid?