So I was reading Salon this morning, and Glenn Greenwald had an interesting theory - supported by some members of Congress and (perhaps) common sense. (picture from http://www.chromasia.com)
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The theory is that our government has too much information to process and therfor important information falls through the cracks.
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Now, of course, he is coming at it from the liberal mind-set that Congress should never have granted the Feds unlimited access to e-mails, telephone calls and whatever they want to stick their fat heads into. But forget for a moment the "political" slant. The argument - unfettered access yields too many results to shift through. Has some validity.
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His argument was that when our intelligence agencies had to focus on specific possible threats - they did a better job.
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This is hard to argue with when the father of the Nigerian bomber came to the US Embassy and said, "I think my son is going to try to blow something up." If we had that information and followed up, maybe we could have found him. Instead we put him on a terrorist watch list that has 500,000 people - and no one to shift through it.
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So... instead of all this information collection making us safe - it makes us less safe because the real leads are lost in the chaff.
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