Judge rules NSA phone collections likely unconstitutional

Amen

I think having the Patriot Act is letting the terrorists win.

I'll alert my wife.

Remember after 9/11?  Everyone said that our covert ops were pitiful.  So many people said, "Someone should have known.  The CIA, the FBI, where was our intelligence?"

I remember feeling that way.  There is a price to be paid.  I'm not sure that it is worth it.

Unfortunately there's no way to catch everything and bad things will happen with or without the NSA stuff.  I'm sure the NSA stuff will help them back track and find the bad guy after the fact, but even with 9/11 they didn't have any issues at all identifying exactly who was involved and started it.  The NSA can't provide a single example of a threat that's been averted because of the phone collection service, so in my opinion it's nothing more than a forensics tool for them to mine after the fact.

Everyone is trying to sell this program as a tool to "keep us safe", but it's not going to prevent anything.  It's merely going to give them more datapoints to sift through after the attack has occurred.

Here's somewhat of an analogy I think of with regards to the technical side of this program.
I work in IT and seven or eight years ago every company wanted to have Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) put in place.  They were very expensive and sophisticated tools to watch for patterns in traffic and proactively prevent network based attacks.  Great idea and they did work, but here the problem  There were so many false positives and just outright noise that the systems were constantly blocking traffic to the point that it caused legitimate business traffic to constantly get impaired.  After a short period of pain, almost every company that tried to use it proactively turned that feature off and just used it to collect data.  Then if there was an attack they could go back and search for suspicious things around the time of the attack.  In other words the proactive alerting and detection was worthless, which was the whole selling point for the product.

The NSA isn't any more sophisticated than any other IT organization.  They may try to put in place signatures and alerts to catch suspicious traffic, but there will be so much noise that it will be impossible to discern legitimate threats versus some teenager talking about blowing up a mailbox with a firecracker.  So my opinion is there is zero proactive safety value to this program.