I actually watched that somewhere’s else – one thing not shown on your clip I found more interesting was when Jordan pointed out to the Director that Jordan submitted his questions to the Director in advance. The Director then dissembled in the finest DC traditions.

“You can’t be much more Caucasian than someone from the Caucasus.”

“Arabs can’t be anti-Semitic because they are Semitic, too.”

“Leftists can’t be jerk-offs because most of them are right-handed.”

Thanks.

Uhm, Malcolm …

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mueller

Much ado about nothing.

To fish by trailing a line.

[Middle English trollen, to wander about, from Old French troller, of Germanic origin.]

To argue against data mining requires placing greater value on the potential risk of government abuse than the lives of thousands of innocents.

Yes, that’s exactly right, it does. Abusive governments were responsible for the annihilation of tens of millions of innocents in the last century; meanwhile far more people are killed each year by falls and drowning than by terrorism, or even by war.

Yes, the IBD editorial quotes no sources, which doesn’t exactly burnish its credibility. We’ll see where the story goes.

I agree also that there are things that must be done in secret if they are to be done at all, and I do not see Manning and Snowden as heroes. This does not bear on the fact that governments often do things in secret that they arguably should NOT be doing; I’m glad that the sun now shines on the NSA’s telephone and PRISM operations.

Again, and this is what I keep coming back to as cutting the Gordian knot here: if we didn’t have such a blithe attitude toward the importation of Islam into the West, none of this would be necessary. Instead, we must surrender more and more of our privacy and liberty to manage the threat it has created, and it will just keep getting worse.

I have always thought that Daniel Ellsberg is a hero, but I believe that Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden should spend the rest of their days in the Big House. I asked myself if there is a contradiction here. I think not, as one can draw a principled distinction between releasing information which is kept secret to avoid embarrassing the government and information whose release is likely to cause tangible harm or (in the case of Wikileaks) deaths.

The flaw in that argument is that it enables Ellsberg. in his sole discretion, to determine that releasing the Pentagon Papers would not cause tangible harm, but I think this is trumped by the benefits of putting a flashlight into areas where the sun don’t shine. It’s a question as interesting and as difficult as whether John Brown was a sinner or a saint.

Anyway, to cast this as a zero-sum trade-off between Orwellian surveillance and rivers of blood in Times Square is what Mr. Obama is fond of calling a “false choice”. My question would be: what the hell was Najibullah Zazi doing here in the first place?

If you stipulate that these programs prevented Najibullah Zazi from detonating a bomb in the subway, then it becomes very difficult to argue against them. A bomb set off in the Times Square station during rush hour could easily lead to carnage as bad, or worse, than 9/11. To argue against data mining requires placing greater value on the potential risk of government abuse than the lives of thousands of innocents.