Here’s what I think. I understand peoples’ concerns about the gathering of phone records and overseas internet data but there has been a lot of knee-jerk jumps to conclusions, many of which have been cleared up already. Take the gathering of phone data. Conversations are not being recorded. That still requires court approved wiretap warrants and can only happen in real time. Phone companies do not record our conversations so that information is simply not there to be handed over. What is being gathered is which numbers called which numbers and the duration of the phone calls. There are no names connected to the phone numbers in the data being collected. The database just sits there untouched and there is Congressional and Judicial oversight to make sure of that.  If there is reasonable cause to believe someone is actively involved in either carrying out or planning an act of terror the court is asked for a warrant to investigate the telephone numbers of that person. If possible a wiretap might be permitted by the court just as would be the case in a criminal organized crime investigation. Even if actually conversations could be recorded en mass and kept in a database it would be virtually impossible to listen to everyone’s phone calls and read everyone’s text messages. Which brings me to internet data collection. It would be virtually impossible to read everyone’s emails, blogs, comments, in-game texting, etc. and it is illegal to do so although the Supreme Court has said there is a reasonable question as to whether or not what we put online belongs to the public domain. The Supreme Court has decided for now that it doesn’t but left the door open, it seems. I’m deeply relieved to know the NSA is not reading my puns. 

Then there’s Rand Paul who never let’s facts get in the way of what he wants to tell his base. Even yesterday he was still complaining about the government listening to our phone calls and reading our emails in spite of the fact everyone else knows this is not the case. 

Compare what the government has been doing to what private companies are doing. Companies have been gathering personal information about us for decades. Something recent is the growing use of facial recognition technology by firms to further gather information about us. Imagine you stop to look at a window display or a mannequin wearing clothing that catches your eye. There is a growing probability that your face is being recorded without your knowledge and put into some company’s database to be scrutinized and added to all the other data that has been gathered about you. There are already stores that use the technology. The moment you enter a store that uses the technology your face is captured and added to a database. In my opinion what companies are doing is far more concerning further reaching than what the government is doing and there is a big difference between the two. Companies do this to profit from us. The government is doing this to protect us from terrorism and the data collected has helped thwart terrorist attacks. One thwarted was a plan to bomb the NYC Subway System. 

Think back several weeks to the Boston Marathon bombing. Phone records were quickly gathered to determine within days who else might have been involved in some way. There is also a hypocrisy to be pointed out here. Almost immediately after the bombing people were asking, “Why did the FBI not know ahead of time? Why wasn’t the FBI tapping the phone calls of the two bombers?” It’s a case of your damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Imagine if there were numbers of successfully carried out terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. People would be demanding to know why more was not done to prevent them. 

As for drone attacks it is horrible that innocent people are killed but what is the better alternative? Nearly a million Iraqi civilians were killed or forced into refugee status. Going to all out war with a country because it harbors terrorists is not a good solution as we learned from Iraq. Iraq is a mess right now. Nothing was accomplished at the expense of life and treasure. In getting Bin Laden President Obama made the risky decision of sending in a Navy Seal Team in helicopters across Pakistan. He did so because a drone would definitely have caused collateral damage as the compound was situated within a civilian neighborhood. Anyone who remembers Carter’s decision to send helicopters into Iran to rescue hostages there understands the great risk. Sending a Seal Team into many of these situations is highly dangerous even with the element of surprise at our backs and to do so as the standard modus operandi to the point terrorists would remain on the lookout is not an option. We could do nothing but then when the terrorist attacks start getting through to U.S. soil you know people are going to be asking why more wasn’t done to prevent them. 

I cannot think of a less costly short-term solution for fighting terrorism and we’ve hit Al Qaeda hard with these drone strikes. Over the long term diplomacy is the only real best option and not making enemies but then this has to be considered on the last point. During the 1980s we under Reagan aided Bin Laden in Afghanistan, supplying his Taliban with weaponry and training. He bit the hand that fed him. There were other issues involved but that’s too much to go into here.