So, basically, Bush can just "pull over" the entire population of the United States and search us?

And that's 'okay'?

"Bush" doesn't have the records; NSA does. I don't concede he doesn't need to follow the law. As best we know so far, no law was broken. Records were voluntarily turned over by phone companies seeking to help fight the war on terrorists.

There's no meaningful sense in which my rights are being violated by having NSA computers looking for webs of connections with terrorists. Indeed, to the extent that they have been violated, it's because Verizon turned the records over without demanding a warrant.

It's a pretty big leap from that to warrantless searches of specific people's information. Going from mass to personal is a big leap.

Telecommunications giant Qwest refused to provide the government with access to telephone records of...

True, James. But if you can do the first without any legal oversight or cause for suspicion of criminal activity, why not the second? No one's rights remain inviolate and the Constitution be damned. That's the problem.

A better example of datamining would be something like:

Create two sets of call data. One of the total body (or a sufficiently large subset) of calls between the US and Saudi Arabia. A second of the calls between known terror suspects in the US and know terror suspects in Saudi Arabia.

Determine a statistic where the expected value for the first set differs from the first set to the second set (e.g. the ratio of calls from the US to the calls from Saudi Arabia, the number of common contacts, etc.)

Now look for sets of people A and B for who the value of this statistic is closer the terrorist value to than to the total call value.

You'll notice the difference here is that in this example that neither A nor B need have know ties (direct or indirect) to terrorism at all. Nor is there anything explictly terrorist about the activity that got them chosen for scrutiny.

Respecting a need for warrants? Yeah, right. Old Alberto G. says Bush doesn't need no stinking warrants, because Bush is the queen of America.

James, your rationalizing of the "anonymization" bollocks doesn't hold up. They have the data. It's being used any way they want. I'm quite sure they have the phonecall database tied into other databases, and could bring up all your phonecalls in seconds by putting in your name. (That may be against the law, but Bush and Al G. have decided that laws don't apply to Queen George.)

The only anonymization that would count would be if, BEFORE turning the data over, the phone companies replaced the phone numbers with unique numbers uncorrelated to any other data anywhere, so that the NSA could determine only that phone 345232 called phone 87322.

That, however, would be useless for the NSA's purposes. It would also prevent linking the datasets of all the phone companies, because each company's data would be different.

So, forget it. There is no anonymization, unless you trust the scofflaw Bush administration to restrain itself.

This is the key. I assume that Kevin Drum is writing under the assumption that there is no need for warrants before taking this step (or, further, that any need for warrants might be ignored). I would assume the same. So perhaps we should try to find out if this assumption holds or not.

If there is such a need for warrants, and it is respected, then Drum is being over-the-top, and James' criticism is valid. If there is not such need, then Drum is right in his characterizations.