Does the N.S.A. really need all the stuff it’s collecting?

Intelligence for Dummies

By GAIL COLLINS, NYT

Question for the day: Do you feel more secure or less secure, now that you know the government is keeping a gargantuan pile of information about everybody’s telephone calls in the name of national security?

You have heard, I’m sure, that the National Security Agency has been mining Verizon’s records for information, such as numbers called and the location where the call was made. This is known as “telephony metadata,” and the very fact that we now have a term like “telephony metadata” is perhaps reason enough to be against the entire concept.

“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” President Obama assured the American people on Friday. Well, probably nobody. And, if they are, it’s under an entirely different part of the program.

We’ve had a passel of these stories this week. (It also appears that the N.S.A. is sucking personal e-mails and other data from the servers of the giant Internet companies.) Security issues are very tough to figure out. One side is always saying, as Obama did on Friday, that whatever is going on will “help us prevent terrorist attacks.”

(More here.)