Data Mining: "...nothing but civil liberty infringement engines."

The administration's official claim is that NSA is intercepting only calls from al Qaeda into the US, and that a very limited number of calls are being intercepted.

The Washington Post reported February 5 that NSA has intercepted hundreds of thousands of faxes, e-mails, and telephone calls involving thousands of Americans, without warrants.

The article also explains how data mining works, and why it is not selective eavesdropping as the administration claims.

The man who invented it, an IBM scientist, said he sympathizes with "an analyst facing an unknown threat who gathers enormous volumes of data and says, 'There must be a secret in there.' "

But pattern matching, he argued, will not find it. Techniques that "look at people's behavior to predict terrorist intent," he said, "are so far from reaching the level of accuracy that's necessary that I see them as nothing but civil liberty infringement engines."

The entire piece is here.