Eugene Robinson: NSA’s misguided snooping--If you try to know everything--You end up knowing nothing
Eugene Robinson: NSA’s misguided snooping on innocent people
By Eugene Robinson
Even those who believe the National Security Agency’s vacuum-cleaner surveillance of electronic communications does not trample privacy rights should be troubled by this practical implication: If you try to know everything, you end up knowing nothing.
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The NSA seeks something like omniscience regarding electronic communications. But it is not enough to have a crucial tidbit of information stored on a server somewhere. For that information to be useful, it has to be identifiable and accessible. The more indiscriminately you amass data, the harder it is to find the relevant bits.
The NSA’s position is essentially that the bigger the haystack it can gather, the more needles it can find. But given the ever-increasing volume of electronic communications around the world, what sense does it make for the NSA to clutter its data banks with information about people — foreign and domestic — who pose no threat? Retaining this material, apparently for up to five years, is not just an invasion of the targets’ privacy but also a waste of the NSA’s capacity for storage and analysis.
If NSA officials are so confident they can manage the unimaginably vast quantities of data the agency is assembling, then why have they repeatedly given public assurances that Snowden — whom they frequently describe as a lowly analyst — had no access to the kind of sensitive data he gave to The Post? Does the agency really have any idea of what is already in its databases? Does the NSA know who might be sifting through this material? And for what purposes?
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the rest:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eugene-robinson-nsas-misguided-snooping-on-innocent-people/2014/07/07/3f6cb7b8-05f8-11e4-8a6a-19355c7e870a_story.html
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