Inventing abuse: if the administration isn't violating civil liberties in its pursuit of terrorists, some people will say it is anyway

National Review, June 5, 2006 by Stephen Spruiell

The facts are not generous to critics of the NSA phone-data program. And the case they make also seems rather out of place in a post-9/11 security environment. They have not only applauded USA Today's exposure of a secret national-security program, they have based their objections to it on the merest hypothetical abuses. Their primary line of attack is that the NSA could enter these phone numbers into other databases to get names and addresses and, as the New York Times editorial board put it, "compile dossiers of what people and organizations each American is in contact with."

Leave aside the fact that the sheer size of the database and the task for which it was designed make anything like that highly unlikely. The bottom line, says Terwilliger, is that "the government is legally allowed to acquire this material from the telephone companies, and whether they do it piecemeal or wholesale seems to me immaterial to the legal analysis." It does make a difference, however, when it comes to the speed with which the government can analyze the data. Terwilliger, who handled terrorism cases as a U.S. attorney, says it can take months and months to put a link analysis together if you have to get a separate subpoena for each new set of phone records. "If what we're trying to do is prevent another attack," he says, "we don't have the luxury of taking months and months."

The critics of the program can't stop the government from acquiring these records, but they want to slow it down--for fear that the NSA's data-mining technology will be used for some sinister purpose. And that bothers Debra Burlingame, whose brother Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III was piloting American Airlines Flight 77 the day Islamist terrorists hijacked it and crashed it into the Pentagon. Debates over privacy and security aside, her foremost concern is that news organizations like USA Today are running stories that tell our enemies what we're doing to prevent their attacks.

"The more these NSA programs are revealed, the more our enemies learn," she says. "That is my fear--that in defending these programs, we render them useless."

Mr. Spruiell writes the media blog for National Review Online.