Missing the Forest

Just when it appeared things could not get any worse for President Bush, news came Thursday that the National Security Agency has been secretly compiling an enormous database of every phone call made in the United States. The chorus of criticism came immediately, leaving the President where he has been for quite some time: on the defensive.

While this program differs from the previously-disclosed, devastating-to-Bush warrantless eavesdropping program in that it does not involve monitoring the content of our calls -- phew! -- this newly-disclosed, devastating-to-Bush call documenting program captures many more individuals and involves monitoring purely domestic calls. In all, more than 200 million Americans have likely had their phone calls documented. That's two-thirds of the country.

As a government program, this is downright spooky. The government has set out to analyze every phone call American citizens make. Even those who assumed the worst about the government must be at least somewhat surprised to have their suspicions confirmed by such a giant Orwellian effort.

Beyond the spookiness and the obvious legal questions, my personal concern is minimal. I am not too worried that my call history will arouse much interest from the government. But this is precisely the problem. Why is the NSA wasting time and resources monitoring my calls? I am not a high value target in the war on terror and I doubt that the 100 hits a week on unevenkiel.com warrant a Plame-esque smear campaign from the White House. The vast majority of the country falls into the same innocuous category as I do. So, what exactly are they keeping track of our calls for?

Assuming the program is documenting the calls of 200 million Americans as reported, a conservative estimate would be that information on several billion calls has been collected. I understand that data mining computers are efficient, but there comes a point when less is more. Wouldn't it be smarter to expend our intelligence resources on actual threats rather than noting how often I call my wife from work?

I'm tempted to leave such matters of intelligence to intelligence experts, as those in charge of the NSA ostensibly are. However, one phrase that has been repeated too many times in the past five years is "failure of intelligence." Prior to 9/11, an FBI agent had identified one of the hijackers as suspiciously learning to fly planes, but the warning never reached a desk where action could be taken. This was a "failure of intelligence." In Iraq, Bush administration officials presented evidence of weapons programs to support the need to go to war. When the weapons programs proved nonexistent, this was a "failure of intelligence." The bungling of post-war Iraq has also been blamed on a "failure of intelligence." When intelligence fails, the results are catastrophic.

The latest phone documentation program is symptomatic of the wrongheaded intelligence practices that often lead to intelligence failures. American intelligence agencies have shown an aversion to doing the difficult work of gathering intelligence, settling instead for faster and arguably less effective means, such as torture. Casting an incredibly large net, as this call-documenting program does, ensures that the NSA will be analyzing a whole lot of useless information rather than doing the harder, but more effective work of surveilling individuals who are actual threats.

The next several weeks will see politicians from both parties denounce this program as unacceptable and an affront to our civil liberties. However, the real debate should focus less on the program's legality (or, more likely, illegality) and more on its effectiveness (or, more likely, ineffectiveness). It is bad enough that the NSA is monitoring my calls. But the real trouble is that the NSA is monitoring my calls when it could be following leads on suspicious individuals learning to fly planes. This program, I fear, is yet another "failure of intelligence" waiting to happen.