TMI

The latest exposure of our government's penchant for spying on its citizens, the recording of "metadata" on the phone calls of all Americans, is being mostly greeted with yawns. This is, after all, what civil libertarians said would happen when the Patriot Act was passed, and again when it was re-authorized and amended a few years ago, and nobody much cared then, either. I would like to make two points.

The first is about secrecy. The real danger posed by our counter-terrorism efforts come from the complete secrecy that surrounds them. Our experience with governments is that they act very differently in the light of day, and routinely commit crimes when they think they can keep their actions secret. When IRS officials started targeting Tea Party groups for tax law harassment, those groups immediately complained to their Congressmen, leading to an investigation by the IG and now a major scandal. If the NSA started harassing Muslim groups, or civil libertarian groups, how would we know? It would all be so secret that even if the targets of such an investigation found out it would be a felony for them to reveal it. If there was an investigation, the results would be secret; even the reason why it had to be kept secret would be secret. Many members of Congress have long known about the NSA's accumulation of phone records, but they have said nothing because this was all secret. I suppose that if they find what they learn appalling they are supposed to push for amending the law, but how can they push for amending a popular law when they can't discuss publicly the government behavior that they want to reform? One reaction to the latest disclosure from many newspapers has been to ask why this program was kept secret anyway, since its exposure seems to have made no difference. In a democracy, the only things that should be kept secret are the ones whose exposure would be a major blow to our security.

My second point is that there is such a thing as too much information. One of America's most prominent archaeologists conducted excavations at a western ghost town for years, using the most careful field methods and the most comprehensive cataloging of artifacts -- measuring the surface area of every fragment of window glass, for example. He had his students accumulate every scrap of written data about the town, from complete runs of its two newspapers to the census. The result of this attempt at a total archaeology has been -- nothing. There is so much data that nobody can make sense of it.

The NSA is falling into the same trap. Starting from the premise that the traces of terrorism must be out there, somewhere, they have set out to acquire all the information on all electronic communications anywhere in the world. Has this helped us maintain order in Iraq, defeat the Taliban, prevent terrorist attacks in America, or any other security goal worth naming? I submit that it has not. The people behind this are caught up in a fantasy of data, sure that if a little helps, more must be better, and if only they could have complete data all our problems would be solved. But it doesn't work that way. These databases are so large as to be completely useless. When you have all the data in your system, you have only replicated the world outside, and what you have is just as messy as that world and therefore exactly as hard to interpret.

If we eliminated all this data mining nonsense, we would be in no more danger from terrorists. If we then spent the money on something like inspecting chemical plants we would be a whole lot safer.