Perhaps if we were doing the targeted surveillance envisioned by Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., when he wrote the Patriot Act, we wouldn't need so many potential security risks.
It boggles the mind that
we didn't listen to the Russians when they warned about the Tsarnaev brothers in part because, well, they're the Russians. But we want to preserve the records of every housewife in Des Moines because data mining that arguably invades the privacy rights of innocent Americans might reveal something.
One person whose privacy was not invaded by U.S. intelligence was Tamerlan Tsarnaev, as he repeatedly
visited the al-Qaida online magazine Inspire for its recipe "Build a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom."
The NSA's blanket surveillance did not detect Tsarnaev's interest in building the pressure cooker bombs he would use to devastating effect at the Boston Marathon.
The massive databases that we are building a massive facility in Utah to store also failed to uncover the online communications that Tsarnaev had with a known Muslim extremist in Dagestan.