Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Thoughts on phone-call tracking

The Washington Post found in a snap poll that a majority of Americans are willing to accept the trade-off of diminished privacy for enhanced security. As I discussed in a recent op-ed , this is a false choice. Security and liberty are flip sides of the same coin and are very much entwined. It's important to remember that before Bush took office, the U.S. effectively uncovered and thwarted terrorist plots without epic collection of phone and other third party records, without extralegal surveillance, and certainly without stooping to torture. The millennium attack, for example, was discovered and thwarted using tried-and-true investigative techniques, which furthermore yielded a wealth of information about al-Qaeda's plans for the U.S. --- information which might have prevented further attacks if the right people had paid attention .

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